If your website has a search bar, you need to ensure you’re making the most of this valuable report in Google Analytics. It’s quick to set up and can soon be giving you all sorts of insights and ideas that you may never have had without it.

1. How to Use Google Analytics Site Search Reports
If your website has a search bar, you need to ensure you’re making the most of this
valuable report in Google Analytics. It’s quick to set up and can soon be giving you all sorts
of insights and ideas that you may never have had without it.
The Site Search report is found under Behavior and is focused on recording how people
interact with the search functionality on your website. This is actually even more valuable
since organic keywords started appearing as "(not provided)", as this report shows what
people have actually typed, even if it is on your site instead of into Google – it’s likely that
there are overlaps!
Setting Up Site Search Reports
To set this report up, navigate to the Admin, then the View Settings for your chosen profile
and scroll down to the Site Search Settings section. Here you just click the button to turn it
on and then type or paste in the query that your website uses in search parameters. For
example, searching on this site gives you a results URL that looks like this:
http://www.google.com/#q=hi
In this example, the "q" is the search parameter, so this is what would go in the field here:

2. You will find a tick box under this option which gives you the choice to strip parameters out
of the URL. If that was ticked for Search Engine Watch all search results URLs would show
in the content reports under /search, whereas without ticking it each search will generate a
URL with the query included, which will break out the results and not allow you to see the
data for search results pages in one row in the content report.
There are benefits to both methods, so it will depend on your reporting and website setup
as to which choice will work best for you.
To get an even more detailed breakdown of data in the reports you can also specify
categories, if that applies to your website. Here you pop in each category parameter and
you will have a report available to group activity together within these.
Site Search Reports
Overview
The Overview report, much like any other, gives you a summary of the data relevant to that
report. In this case it gives you a clear percentage of how many visits on your website
included the use of the search functionality as well as how the interaction played out
following the search.
Usage:
This report has two rows of data, one for visits with site search and one for visits which did
not include the use of the search functionality. This allows you to directly compare the
success rate of people using search against those who don’t to work out whether the

3. conversion rates are very different, whether new visitors are more likely to be using the
search box, or how much revenue you have generated by people using this option.
All standard metrics are available and the Site Usage, Goals, and E-Commerce reports are
easily accessible above the graph so you can drill into the most relevant report for your site.
Search Terms
This is where it gets very interesting! The words and phrases that your visitors have used in
your search box are recorded here so that you can work out what people are looking for on
your website. Each query used is shown alongside search usage metrics but Goal and E-
Commerce reports are also available.
There are many uses for this report. Some examples include:
 How many pages it took for people to find what they wanted
 How many visitors gave up and left the website
 Which keywords did not have good enough results so users had to refine their terms
 How persistent visitors were with their query, by how many pages of results they looked through
 Most common queries
 Trends and identifying new searches which can help you identify products to stock or content to
write about
 Identifying common misspellings or other ways to phrase something
 Which areas of the site people choose to search for over navigating through a menu for
 Which queries lead to users being engaged with the website
 Queries that have good conversion rates
As mentioned above, this data can also be broken down by category, so if you have set this
up, click the link above the data table for "Site Search Category" and you will be able to see
this data.