Search Tools: Analytics

Misty Flowers

February 14, 2018 18:46

In the Search Tools feature in Composer, configure settings in each area to provide optimum findability for visitors to your site. This article will show you how to view search Analytics. Have you ever wondered what your users are searching for on your site? How about what users are searching for but not finding? With Finalsite’s Search Analytics feature, these insights - and more - are right at your fingertips.

Analytics overview

To access Analytics, go to Search Tools on your Composer menu, then select Analytics. This screen contains the search data for the previous seven days.

Here are some things you can learn:

how many searches were made on your site
what the top search queries were
what searches returned few hits
which countries the searches originated from in the top-right corner.

View search statistics

In the top blue box, you can learn:

how many searches were made on your site,
how many unique IP addresses those searches came from, and
what the average number of searches were for each IP address.

This gives you insight into whether a lot of visitors made a few searches (which might indicate problems with your site navigation), or a few visitors searched many times.

View Top Searches

Below the blue box, find the Top Searches box on the left. This table tells you what most of your users wanted to find on your site. Click on any of the column headings to sort by that column.

Query is the search term users entered - allowing for a couple characters of variance in case it was mistyped.
Count is the number of times that search term was entered within the past week.
Average Hits is how many results users received after typing in that query.

View Top Searches Returning Few Hits

This table shows valuable information about how your site is functioning in response to users’ queries. Here you can find when users are coming up empty after entering a search term.

Query, again, is the search term used. If the term received any hits, the number will appear next to it in parentheses.
Count is how many times users searched for that term.

If you have a lot of queries with only a few hits, it may be a sign that you need to reconfigure your content. Or, you can take the opportunity to reconfigure your search.

How Advanced Search Tools can strengthen your analytics

With Advanced Search Tools you can add synonyms for these search queries, so these poorly performing search terms can be associated with more effective terms that return the desired content.

View interactive map and origin table

Finally, the bottom of the Analytics page contains an interactive map and a table indicating what countries the previous week’s searches originated from.

Countries on the map will be shaded in light-to-dark blue depending on how many queries it had, and the percentage will be shown when you hover over that country.
The table displays each country, the query count, and the percentage of searches from that country. Some of the results may surprise you!