Web Analytics and Optimization Blog

Google Analytics Internal Site Search Reporting

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If you were one of the lucky few who asked Google to include you in the internal search reporting beta then you’ll be happy to know that they’ve now added the functionality to those profiles! How do I know? If you’re as addicted to looking at your Google Analytics profile as I am then you’ll have noticed that sometime around 11:00 PM EST (GMT -5), a funny looking button under your content tab appeared labeled “Site Search”.

Let me do a quick segment on why, if your site has an internal search engine, you owe it to yourself to configure this reporting right away.

Why should I care?

Unless you’re using a free or open source tool out there (i.e. Google’s Internal Search Engine), you’re very likely spending an awful lot on a search engine like Endeca. Knowing wether or not your internal search engine is actually bringing value or not is a critical question to have answered.

Here are the questions I’m currently asking about internal search and here’s how Google Analytics can now provide the answers:

• Are people even using search? - Google Analytics reports the number of visits that included a search (=number of visits that used your site’s search function at least once). Divide this into total visits and you have what I’m calling a Search Usage Rate, the definitive metric to answer “Is anyone even using this thing!?”
• Is search helping people find things? Are people just getting lost? - Google offers about three metrics that help to answer this question:
  Results Pageviews / Search (=Pageviews of search result pages / Total Unique Searches) - also known as the number of results pages that users are flipping through. Clearly an indicator of your search engine’s ability to deliver relevant results people want, is how many pages of results they need to look through before they find what they need. In my humble opinion, you should strive to have this metric be 1.5 results pageviews / search or lower.
  Search Exits (=number of searches a visitor made immediately before leaving the site) - to borrow a quote from Avinash, this metric measures the effect of “I came, I searched, I puked, I left”. Clearly if your engine is delivering relevant results then people shouldn’t be exiting your site from search results! Thus I’ll go on record saying this is the most important metric to measure the relevancy of search results.
  Search Refinements (=number of times a visitor searched again immediately after performing a search) - a bit of a tricky metric, the number of refinements that a visitor to your site performs in their search for content / products / services is definitely still an indicator of relevancy, but I wouldn’t worry about this one as much. Very often I refine search terms in my head as I’m looking for something as I realize the original thing really wasn’t what I was looking for. This doesn’t mean the search engine’s results weren’t relevant to my terms, they usually are! But more often the search engine actually guides me to think, “Oh yeah…that isn’t really what I was interested in…let me try that.” Clearly if your search engine automatically suggests other terms (i.e. auto corrects spelling mistakes), this will also help out!
• Is the search engine truly helping people on my site and making me more money? - Although I’m sure I’ll get some arguments on this, Google Analytics now answers this with two metrics (both of which need to be taken with a grain of salt):
  Time after Search (= average amount of time visitors spend on your site after performing a search) and
  Search Depth (= average number of pages visitors viewed after performing a search) - on a content-based site, if search did its job, it helped users find the content that they wanted and that results in a great and more engaged experience. An engaged experience means longer time on site and longer pageviews per visit.
  Segmentation Kicks Butt!
  Using Google’s new Site Search segmentation report, you can even get a answer to the question, “Are visitors that use search more engaged or higher value than visitors who don’t use search?” That to me is just amazing! Now you have hard and fast numbers to use to either invest heavily in that heavy-duty search engine or say, “You know what guys? It really isn’t worth our time.”
  On an e-commerce / lead generation site, you’ll need to establish a threshold of what a comfortable range of time after search and search depth are for your site. High values for either of these metrics could imply that visitors didn’t find what they needed from search and just got fed up with it afterwards. On the other hand, using the segmentation abilities that Google now has for Site Search (shown above) you can get an answer to the most important question for any e-commerce site, “Did this site search thing I spent $x make a significant return?”

So what’s the “Big Picture” for Search?

From a bit of previous experience with this kind of thing I tend to say you can look at three big categories (from my previous posts, you’ll know I’m big on this kind of thing) of metrics that I find help to map the strategy of what search is supposed to accomplish: Usage, Satisfaction and Value.

Usage

Are people even using your search engine? Maybe the search box isn’t prominent or maybe your categories are too confusing. These metrics help you answer if there’s a problem and provide a means to monitor your optimizaiton efforts.

• Visits with search
• Total unique searches

Satisfaction

Are visitors satisfied with what they get from their search results? Finding a search box is one thing, but getting the right results is another! Luckily there are a host of metrics here that truly tell you if your search engine is doing its job. If these metrics start to slip you may need to look at how your search engine is indexing content, the categories available for people to search on (taxonomy) and automatic corrections available in your search engine (i.e. correcting spelling / grammar mistakes).

• Results pageviews / search
• Search Exits
• Search Refinements
• Time After Search
• Search Depth

Value

Otherwise known as Return on Investment, if you’re spending a lot of money on your internal search engine wouldn’t it be nice to know that it’s making money for you?

ROI: Content-based Sites

Believe it or not, calculating the straight revenue your search engine is technically responsible for is easy!
Once you’ve got this amount you’ve got your benefits, subtract the costs of the search engine and divide this into those costs and voila! Return on your search investment.

ROI: E-commerce Sites

For once, you guys have it easy! Using Google’s search segmentation report you can see exactly how much revenue visits that included search were responsible for. Giving you not only a way to calculate internal search ROI but also determine revenue contribution of your internal search engine.

ROI: Other site types

It gets a bit more fuzzy for additional site types, but using Google’s segmentation reports and assigning value to goals within Google Analytics, you could theoretically calculate exactly how much value your internal search engine provides, which is the first step towards calculating ROI.

Wrapping Up…

Of course the new functionality offers even more reporting, but analysis has to start with a big picture view, or else you’ll get bogged down with ‘analysis paralysis’. I think the tips above provide that “top-down” view that can help focus your analysis of internal search before getting lost in an expanded set of reports.Please feel free to leave some comments! I’d love to know what everyone thinks!

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