ShopSite has a feature to view details on what customers search for on your ShopSite store, but if you’re already using Google Analytics to track your website you can greatly increase the details available by tracking your ShopSite search form in Google Analytics.  It may sound like a complicated thing to configure, but it’s actually just a couple of simple settings.

Note: This does assume that you are already using ShopSite’s search functionality on your website.

Configuring Google Analytics

In your Google Analytics account, click on the “Admin” link near the top right, followed by “Profile Settings”.  You should see a form similar to the one below:

Search Settings (Click for full size)

Now do the following:

1. Enter “storeid” in the “Exclude URL Query Parameters” field (this cleans up page reports)
2. Turn on the “Do track Site Search” (this enables the parsing of search variables)
3. Enter “search_field” in the Query Parameter field (this is the variable ShopSite uses for the search terms)
4. Turn on “Strip query parameters out of URL” (this further cleans up page reports)

That’s all there is to it.  Just visit your store and run a few test searches so you’ll know there will be data for the report.  It may take up to 24 hours for the results to start showing up in Analytics.

The Analytics Reports

Search Results Sample

In Google Analytics you will find the search reports on the Content > Site Search menu.  There are a variety of reports available, such as showing details about how often the search tool is used, and to the right we have a sample of the Search Terms report which provides details on what users search for.

…

ShopSite’s search logging will still excel in 1 major way – counting how many products appear in the search results.  Google has no way to know whether search results were returned or not, but ShopSite’s stats will show you the products with the most results returned, and the products that had no results returned.

Google Analytics will not replace ShopSite’s search logging feature, but you may still find it a very useful way to learn more about your customer’s habits and how they are using your website.