Tutorial

How to send community search data into Google Analytics (Site search)


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  • Gainsight Employee: ACE
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This tutorial will show you how you can add Google Site Search to your Google Analytics. With this you can:

  • learn what customers are searching for the most on your community
  • identify which search leaves your customers unhappy
  • find opportunities for new content which will help your users

How to add it

Adding this is actually really simple. You just need to have access to your Google Analytics account in order to set it up.

Once you are in your Google Analytics environment, go to the "admin" section (1). Then click on "view settings" (2).
 

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Then, you need to activate the "Site search Tracking" (3) and add "q" as the value which Google needs to identify search queries in a url.

 

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And that's it, Google will now start tracking the search queries on your community.

 

 

 

How to read it

After Google has started to track the search queries on your community, you can dig through the results.

 

Most of the metrics are easy to understand. Below you can find some additional information on some important metrics which might not be so clear:

 

 

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% of search exits
This metric shows you how many users closed the tab/window after being on the search results page. It means that users did not find the information they were looking for.

% Search refinements
This metric represents the share of users who performed a new search right after searching on the community. Again a metric which is an indicator of how many users find the content they are looking for.

Time after Search
This value indicates how much time users spend after the search reading content on your community. A low value would mean that many users try to find a solution within a topic, however find quickly that it is not the correct answer.

Tip: By clicking on an individual keyword, you will see a more detailled view of the behaviour of users around a search for this.

 

 


12 replies

Awesome! I hadn't even thought to change this after we migrated. Thanks for sharing!

Hi @Julian,

 

Just implemented Analytics 4 via GTM and I get some search terms in analytics but most of the events appear under the (not set) label - when I also have a search (search  12:44) that is displayed correctly. Any idea why I get this ?

 

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Hi,

sorry for the delay in response - I don’t have that much experience with Analytics 4 hence I am also not sure why you are seeing the events that way. So far I have not gotten any smarter but I will check with the product team, maybe they have an idea if there are any expected differences and if we need to do something about it.

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Thanks a Lot @Julian  for another v actionable article.

We already had this turned ON, credit to @lila_meyer , and I was surprised to see the Exact %visits for us as your screenshot 7.9% people using Site search.

Interesting. Would you know other examples where people have said that?

I would definitely want easily > 50% people using Site search because that is a key behaviour on a Community/Knowledge center.

I could think of gamification to reward that behaviour maybe in the future but really design, placement of the Search bar, presence of search bar across all views and pages and things like that.

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Thanks a Lot @Julian  for another v actionable article.

We already had this turned ON, credit to @lila_meyer , and I was surprised to see the Exact %visits for us as your screenshot 7.9% people using Site search.

Interesting. Would you know other examples where people have said that?

I would definitely want easily > 50% people using Site search because that is a key behaviour on a Community/Knowledge center.

I could think of gamification to reward that behaviour maybe in the future but really design, placement of the Search bar, presence of search bar across all views and pages and things like that.

 

Hey this is quite a timely discussion as I'm looking at this same metric too.

I wouldn't trust Google Analytics on this one, I've been running communities for a pretty long time (makes me feel old) and I've never seen such low interaction with search - and search is the first and only thing people see in our community: community.typeform.com 

Furthermore the GA Search terms seem more like tags/links that terms people searched. I  believe that what we see in analytics isn't really the whole picture / or even an accurate picture. 

I'd love to see the raw data when it comes to searches not the GA stuff. @Julian is there a way to pull this data from InSided without having to go to GA? 

Thanks 

 

 

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No, as far as I know we send the data straight from our database to GA, so (at the moment) there is no way to get access outside of GA. I could liaise with support to see if they can access it somehow…

I am at this point not sure if this data might be biased by e.g. add-ons or other things that are blocking GA tracking. From what I’ve read in average around 30% of visitors are blocking GA, which could also account for discrepancies here. I am just not sure if this applies as we track search usage directly in our platform so the visitor should not be able to block it, in theory…

@anirbandutta 50% is a dream value which, I am afraid, will be extremely hard to realize. It is a common thing whith all online communities that users (for many different reasons) do not use in-page search.

Think about people that google something and end up in a topic on your community that they are looking for - they will most likely not search on the community if the page that they are on already carries the info.

As a consequence, I usually present this data with the disclaimer that, in the bigger picture, it might be much more valuable to look in Google Search Console what people are searching for. Simply because the total number of searches is way bigger there (in most cases).

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Besides the low numbers of searches what really tells me that GA is not giving us an accurate picture is the top searched terms I see on the report, they almost match exactly our tags. So, If I put my skeptical hat on, Google Analytics is pretty much reporting tags and not the terms people input on the search. 

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I see what you mean, I will try to dive into that but my time is extremely limited these days. 😞 But would love to get a strong grip on this, and if it is just to confirm everything is alright here. But so far I have not seen this pattern whenever I check it...

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Just FYI tag search uses a different kind of search (also url), but it performs a search. So it might be influencing it...

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No, as far as I know we send the data straight from our database to GA, so (at the moment) there is no way to get access outside of GA. I could liaise with support to see if they can access it somehow…

I am at this point not sure if this data might be biased by e.g. add-ons or other things that are blocking GA tracking. From what I’ve read in average around 30% of visitors are blocking GA, which could also account for discrepancies here. I am just not sure if this applies as we track search usage directly in our platform so the visitor should not be able to block it, in theory…

@anirbandutta50% is a dream value which, I am afraid, will be extremely hard to realize. It is a common thing whith all online communities that users (for many different reasons) do not use in-page search.

Think about people that google something and end up in a topic on your community that they are looking for - they will most likely not search on the community if the page that they are on already carries the info.

As a consequence, I usually present this data with the disclaimer that, in the bigger picture, it might be much more valuable to look in Google Search Console what people are searching for. Simply because the total number of searches is way bigger there (in most cases).

Makes sense and I guess also the auto completed results served upfront as you start to type in a Discussion/Idea based on your keywords - those cases dont add up.

Maybe 50% is too high but in general I’d love to see more of this behaviour but thanks @Gabolino and @Julian for stating that the ‘Search’ analytics need to be taken with a pinch of salt.

For long tail Google searches, SEO and interesting stuff, definitely on my plate to evaluate next. Thank you Community - you are awesome! :)

Hi,

Do we have updated instructions for GA4 on how to do this? @Julian 

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​​​​​@anirbandutta 50% is a dream value which, I am afraid, will be extremely hard to realize. It is a common thing whith all online communities that users (for many different reasons) do not use in-page search.

Think about people that google something and end up in a topic on your community that they are looking for - they will most likely not search on the community if the page that they are on already carries the info.

Also, people what comes from Google, if they didn't find what they are looking for (from the topic they landed) they just close the community and keep searching from Google more.

 

Furthermore the GA Search terms seem more like tags/links that terms people searched. I  believe that what we see in analytics isn't really the whole picture / or even an accurate picture.  

I didnt know but we had this feature activated already 😀

But, I noticed immediatelly that search terms includes tags, not the actual search terms. This feature isnt so helpful as it is now.

 

I'd love to see the raw data when it comes to searches not the GA stuff. @Julian is there a way to pull this data from InSided without having to go to GA? 

Thanks 

Yeah me too. Please build dashboard for us to Control.

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