Home < Technical < Product Overview < Search Engine Analytics

SEARCH ENGINE ANALYTICS

SERP (Search Engine Result Page) analytics help you measure how users interact with the search results on your SERP, which gives insight to how your search engine is functioning. This gives you important data points about where to improve the search experience.

On-site search performance is often overlooked due to the lack of tools available to measure its relevance. Your site’s SERP is prime real estate, which you have full control over (unlike the Google search results page). Optimizing its relevance can be considered the easiest Search Engine Optimization you can do.

Most site search engines and ecommerce site search engines (aka eCommerce search) return low quality results and without detailed search analytics it is impossible to know where the biggest pain points are for your users. 0-results pages are very common even when the content or products exist on the site. The search results many times are shown in the wrong order and users struggle to find what they are looking for.

On-site Search Analytics gives you the important data points you need during discussions with your developers or third party search engine provider; it helps you prioritize the changes you need to make to improve SERP relevance. Prefixbox has its own version of Search Analytics.

Check out the tips below to see the best practices and the aspects you need to track when it comes to measuring your on-site search relevance.

In order to collect Prefixbox Search Analytics you should implement Prefixbox Page Events on your website (Page Events Reference). These JavaScript events collect the following data focusing specifically on measuring your SERP:

Search Results Found / Not Found: with this, you can track the number of results returned for each search keyword and the popularity of the keywords. It also helps you identify the 0-result search keywords and their proportion amongst all your products. Google Analytics does not track the 0-result searches even though this is one of the most important metrics since it gives insight into your search user’s biggest pain points

Search Result Clicks: tracking clicks on the SERP gives you feedback about the user’s intent when searching for a keyword and helps monitor the user engagement after the search. This engagement tells you if the search results are relevant for a keyword.

Search Result Cart events: most eCommerce search result pages have the “Cart” button on them. Tracking cart events on the SERP gives more detailed engagement information than simply tracking clicks. In certain categories (e.g.: Food, Beauty), cart events on SERP happen even more frequently than clicks.

Order events: tracking them in the context of search helps you know the proportion of revenue that comes from the search function. This data is available in GA.

Prefixbox calculates Search Analytics daily.

SERP ENGAGEMENT REPORT

The SERP Engagement report gives you an overview of what users do on the Search Engine Result Page, e.g.: searches, 0-result pages, clicks and cart events. You should aim to reduce the frequency of 0-result pages and increase the click count.

The engagement report also contains important information like paging count per search and clicked positions, which tell you how accurate the product ranking is on the SERP. If both paging and clicked position are low then the search results are relevant and well ordered. You can also see data about clicks per result; a low rate indicates that your results are not so relevant.

SERP – POPULAR SEARCHES

The Popular Searches report helps you analyse frequently searched keywords, understand how many times people click on the results, and which search results are the most engaging.

If a search keyword is popular, but there are not many clicks or cart events on the SERP for this keyword it indicates that the results are not relevant. One of the reasons for this is that the search engine ranking and text matching are not optimized.

You can select a date range to analyse search trends over a period of time.

The following information is available in the report:

TOP CLICKED POSITIONS

For each search term you can see which search results have been clicked the most. Result position, click count, and popularity are all essential information here.

In the example below, the 4th result of the SERP was clicked most often, so it would be a good idea to adjust the ranking so that product is in the 1st position.

The same information can be seen for the cart actions as well.

SERP – 0-RESULT SEARCHES

The 0-result page report helps you analyse the popular keywords for which your site search engine does not return any results. There could be multiple reasons for this:

the product is not available on your site

the product name does not contain the synonym your visitors search

the user made a spelling mistake in the search term

there are some defects in your search engine

or some of the content is not indexed or indexed incorrectly.

Some site search engines show 0-results 30-35% of the time, which means a lot of people can’t find what they’re looking to purchase. Analytics reports that show you which search terms yield no results are invaluable. With this data you can find the terms you need to optimize for and products you should add synonyms for.

The following information is available in the report: