Internal Site Search Analysis and points to consider

Almost all web analytics clicks data is missing one key ingredient: customer intent.

The keywords that people type into search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo! contain a modicum of intent. The real gold is the search engine that you surely have on your website. What? No, you don't? You are the last website on the planet not to have an internal site search engine?

If you directly understand the intent of Visitors on your site, you can better understand the causes for success or failure on your site.

Here's an example. You can look at the top 10 most viewed pages on your site and understand what people who came to your site wanted. How would you know which pages your Visitors wanted to see? If Visitors can't find those pages, then your web analytics tool won't record that action.

One way to overcome the challenge of intent is to look at your internal site search data and see what customers typed into your site search engine. You should perform three clusters of actionable analysis with your internal site search data: site search usage, site search quality, and segmenting.

You need to create customised reports to understand the following:

· What customers typed into your site search engine?

o Report for internal site search keywords usage – broken down by each month

o Where there any seasonal effect or seasonal searches

· Your site Search Usage 

o How much is the search function used - You should find out, out of the total visitors coming to the site – how many visitors actually use this function?

· Internal Site Search Quality

o  Find out whether your site search engine delivers quality results

o Bounce Rate for site search

o Bounce Rate for each keyword searched

o The other way to think about search quality is to measure the number of search results pages that are viewed by the visits so we want  - Results Page Views/Search

o Time After Search (i.e. time spent on our website after doing the search)

o Search Depth (number of pages viewed after searching your site)

o % of Search Refinements (Search Refinements helps understand how Visitors refine their queries to get optimal results)

That wasn't so hard, was it? You can do three simple and effective types of analysis on one of the most valuable sources of data in your possession. So why wait? open your web analytics tool and start creating your customized reports.