Tracking Internal Search via Omniture SiteCatalyst
Internal search is powerful tool on all sites that feature search functionality. Understanding what users are searching for, where they are searching for it, what they are doing after the search, etc are key components to providing users with exactly what they are looking for to promote either improved conversion or content consumption.
Even though many are already tracking internal search on their sites currently, I thought I still would create a posting for those that might not know how to do it or what exactly they should be tracking.
What you need:
- three (3) sProp variables
- one (1) success event
- one (1) s.eVar variable
- getQueryStringParameter plugin (provided by Omniture)
- getPreviousValue plugin (provided by Omniture)
The first step to tracking internal search is to determine how to capture the search term being passed. If the search term is apart of the destination URL, then you can leverage the getQueryStringParameter to grab that value and pass that to the appropriate variable(s). So on the search results/returned page, set one of the sProp variables to capture the search term and the second sProp to capture the number of search results returned for the given search term. An example of this is below:
s.event=”event1,event2″
s.prop1=”web analytics”
s.prop2=”15″
s.prop3=”home page”
s.eVar=”web analytics”
The above example set the success event to show that the search was performed (event2) and sets the appropriate search values to the variables. If zero search results are returned, you should pass “zero” instead of the value “0″. I also added the previous page name so that you can see where searches for given terms are happening the most and potential address/expand upon that. To leverage that, you will need to use the getPreviousValue plugin provided by Omniture. Since you can get the plugins for this from Omniture, I would highly suggest adding that to your s_code file and then using logic similar to the below to capture the values:
var searchTerm = s.getQueryParam(‘searchTerm’)
if (searchTerm)
s.prop1=searchTerm.toLowerCase(); //this standardizes search terms captured by forcing all terms to lower case
s.prop3=s.getPreviousValue(s.pageName,’c3′,’ ‘);
s.eVar1=s.prop1;
s.events=s.apl(s.events,”event2″,”,”,2); //appends event2 to already captured events for the given page
With this in place, you will be able to see and shape the search and subsequent pages to what internal users like. You can also turn on pathing for the search term to see where users are going after they search. Are they searching multiples times or are they searching and then converting? You can also see terms that might be leading to roadblocks to conversion (i.e. misleading navigation, broken links/pages, no search results for a similar word/product, etc).
Written by:
Dorian D. Regester
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