Google Analyics have just produced a very entertaining video to show what Google Analytics is like in real life.
The video is aimed at e-commerce businesses but there is no reason why this video also contains a message for us marketers in the construction specification market. Can the specifiers who visit your website find what they want? What are they searching for when they hit your site?
Have a watch here:
Finding the data in Google Analytics
The on-site search report in Google Analytics requires a bit of setting up before hand depending on how your site search functionality works. Some sites are powered by bespoke content management systems and some maybe powered by WordPress.
Below is a screenshot of where the site search report can be found in Google Analytics:
The Overview report shows you the top 10 searches entered in the ‘search box’ on your website. It also shows you other information such as ‘percentage of search exits’ which is how many people left the site after searching for something. This number should be kept low.
It also shows you ‘search refinements’ which tells you what percentage of people refined their search because they couldn’t find what they were looking for. Again this much be kept low – you want to deliver the right results, first time.
Usage report shows you how many visits used the search option and how many didn’t.
The Search terms report shows you the search terms used and if your CMS is WordPress it may also show you searches which resulted in ‘no results found’ – and this is where you need to do some work by producing some content or enhancing current pages.
The Pages report is very useful. It shows you the pages on which users searched from. Particularly useful if you want to know what people are searching for once they hit a particular product.
As you can see from the below search terms report that ‘cladding’ is a popular search term. You can also see that ‘larch’ brings up no results. Maybe we need to write an article or do a material comparison?
We can also see that ‘coshh’ is also a popular search term – maybe we need to write about health and safety and provide a downloadable COSHH datasheet?
Are you using your internal site search report to help you develop content and help users find what they need? Are you constantly enhancing your content based on what users are searching for?
TIP: many specifiers search by dimensions, weights or materials – analyse what’s being searched for and then go enhance your product pages with some technical information.
