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Linking External and Internal Search Terms in Google Analytics

September 19, 2008

Have you ever wanted to match up internal search terms (i.e., terms that people searched for from your site's internal search feature) with their corresponding external search terms (i.e., terms that people used to find your site in the first place)?

In Google Analytics you can, and while finding the information is not particularly intuitive the first time, it's pretty quick once you know how to do it.

First, of course, you have to set up Site Search, which simply amounts to identifying your site's specific search parameter for Google Analytics so it can scrape the query terms out of your site's search results URLs. Once you've done that (and have begun to gather data for a little while), you're ready to go.

First, drill down to the Content | Site Search | Search Terms report, as shown here:

This shows you all the terms that people searched for on your site, from within your own internal search feature, in the given time period. Pick a term and click it, as shown here:

The resulting screen is the Search Term Overview, which tells you how many people searched for that term, etc. From the Dimension drop-down list, select Keyword, as shown below. This tells Google Analytics to report which external keyword was used by the visitor(s) who eventually searched for "404 redirect" (or whatever search term you selected).

The resulting screen will list the keyword that the user searched for at a search engine to first arrive at your site. In this case, the user searched for "seo using 404 301," as shown here:

If you have a popular search term on your site, the image above would likely be populated with several different external search terms. In this example, however, only one person searched for "404 redirect" on the site in the time period, so there's only one external search phrase that drove the traffic. To find the referring engine, select Source instead of Keyword from the Dimension drop-down.

Exactly what to do with this data is the topic for a separate post, which I hope to have ready soon.

All posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at September 19, 2008 11:50 AM
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Comments

Posted by: Asif Shabbir at March 19, 2009 06:44 AM

Posted by: Asif Shabbir at March 19, 2009 06:46 AM

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