If on your site it has an internal search engine to help visitors locate content, you will probably want to see how this affects your visitor’s experience. This is considered key in any internet marketing campaign and you can do this in Google Analytics with ‘site search’ and view an additional report menu that can be found in the content > site search section.

Once this feature has been has enabled you need to define with query parameter in your URLs contains the visitors site search term. You are normally able to find this quickly by performing a site search yourself and looking for your search term in the result page URL after site search processing has been completely finished.

There is an option to strip your defined search query parameters from the URL after the site search processing has been completed. This can often be helpful if the query parameters are of no further use to you for the purpose of Google Analytics reporting.

Although those parameters could be important for defining your goals, your funnels steps, or your filters. A site search query parameter could also be very important if you are using virtual aid in the reading of your reports.

Google Analytics site search also provides the option to define categories, you can use this to if your site search facility allows visitors to select a category for their search. As an example a retail company may have categories such as  “menswear,” “ladies wear,” an estate agent might have categories like “apartments,” “flats” and “houses.” Categories help us find information easier by focusing the search on a certain area.

As with defining the site search query parameter, category parameters are found from the result page URL, for example, ?cat=menswear or &sect=condo. For these examples the names for the category parameter are “cat” and “sect.” As with the defied query parameter you can also strip your defined category parameters from the URL after the site search processing has been completed. Although the same reasons, only strip the query parameters if necessary.