It’s quite amazing when you begin looking at internal site search.

Recently I started investigating the capabilities of google analytics’ site search and it really has a easy to set up approach with alot of useful metrics that you can define against it.

As long your website uses a url parameter before your internal site search keywords and additionally url parameters in the url to define the categories of internal site search, you can track your site search.
For example, the url parameters of a website might be www.companywebsite.com/searchpage?
search-alias=DVD;field-keywords=harry+potter
where search alias defines the category and field keywords defines the words that were typed into the search box.

You click on your profile, choose Do track site search, add your url parameter that comes up with the keywords that people type into the search box and then the url parameters that define the category on your website, that could be a product type (eg DVD) or a channel (eg rental) or whatever categories apply to your particular website.

Then within a few hours you can begin to what percentage of your visitors use site search, how long they spent looking at the site after a search, what percentage do more that one search (% search refinements), what categories they searched for the most, how did visitor behaviour differ from those that didn’t search.

In essence, there are many ways of really seeing how people are using site search on your site, and this can all be set up in a matter of minutes.