If you entered a web store and tried to find the product you’re looking for but have no idea where to start with, what the best way to resolve this issue? Try getting a search bar for your online shop, it’s only helping your customers to find their products more easily, but you can also monitor what products are most searched for. Thus, to improve product visibility and optimize your website.
For merchants or bloggers who run their own website, SEO plays a big role in increasing your website’s search rank, so people could find your business or blog more easily. You can also monitor your SEO performance from Google Analytics and research on your visitors’ behavior and what are the paths they took to land on your website or the product page.
What is site search?
Merchants can benefit tremendously from installing an internal site search on their website, it provides an easy way to understand your customer’s intent, allowing you to make adjustments to further boost your site’s credentials and conversions.
Try thinking from a user perspective, in what circumstances would they use the internal site search? It’s usually when they know what they’re looking for and don’t want to spend time browsing and looking for the product; or when they already browse through the site and still didn’t find what they want.
In the following passage, we will show you how to set up a site search in Google Analytics, and let you know how to interpret data to optimize your site.
Set up site search in Google Analytics
First, you have to install Google Analytics into your website, and SHOPLINE users can install it easily by following the steps in this article. Then we can move on to set up a site search in Google Analytics.
1. Enter the “admin page” → click on “view settings”
2. Turn on “Site Search Tracking”
3. Type in “/query” in the query parameters
SHOPLINE users can type in “/query” in the query parameters, and other online shop owners can type in whatever parameter is between “?” and “=” in the URL after you performed a search.
Press “save” and it’s done!
How to analyze and optimize site search data?
Click on “Behavior” → “Site search” to get access to the most searched terms and products; see how many visitors used the in-site search.
When you’re reading the report, you may have some questions such as:
Q1. What percentage of visitors have used internal site-search?
A1. In the tab on the left, click on “Behavior” → “Site search” → “Usage” → in the usage report, you can check out how many visits have used site search.
Q2 Can I check what’s the most searched term?
A2 In the “site search” tab, click on “Search Terms” to view all the terms your users have searched for.
Q3 Can I know their search results?
A3 Check “Search page” to get reports about which pages of the website the user was on when they made the search. If If you see (entrance) under this report, your visitors are entering the website on a search results page, which may be caused by marketing activity or natural search results using search URLs.
Q4 How can we know if our users are satisfied with the site search?
A4 You can check this in the overview report. Navigate to “ % search exits” this is the percent of sessions where someone left immediately after searching (without viewing any search results). The higher this is, the more negative it is.
What can you optimize to succeed online?
Through all the data collected from Google Analytics, it gives merchants more insight into how they can better render their services to fulfill customer needs, and here are few tips that merchants can work on to optimize their shop and site search function:
- Optimize in product name
First, let learn about what’s “Percentage Search Refinements” and “Percentage of Search Exits.”
Percentage search refinement means the percentage of searches that resulted in a search refinement (the number of times a user searched again immediately after performing a search) and is divided by the pageviews of search result pages. If the percentage gets higher, it means the product name is too broad and not precise, so users have to make another search to look up the product. If metrics in your percentage search refinement are high, you may want to consider revising your product name.
And Percentage of search exits is calculated by the number of searches made immediately before leaving the site divided by total unique searches. If both the numbers of your Total Unique Searches and Percentage of search exits are high, you might want to check if keywords were missing in your site.
- Prioritize popular products or content
In general, if visitors can find the product they need immediately, they probably won’t use the site search function. So if merchants noticed some terms that are high in total unique searches that can lead to products or content your users are searching for, you can try moving it into places that are more visible on your website, so visitors can find them more easily without the need to make a site search.
- Optimize how visitors engage with your website
If you already know what items are popular among customers, you can use product photos, advertisements, copywriting, to attract and guide your visitors to drive conversion rates.
- Discover potential product and audience
If some terms that are high in total unique search but not related to your online store, you may see this as an interesting opportunity, it might be your next bestselling product!
Marketing Associate at SHOPLINE. A digital marketing nerd and a podcast fan. You can find her out in the woods once in a while but most of the times she’s glued to her laptop screen indoors.