I’ve been collecting decent search data for only about three months now, after an initial misconfiguration. Since we have multiple help sites and multiple search engines, some of the data from the early months of implementation isn’t as useful – for example, I didn’t have the code quite right for stripping out the parameters from the URL, so for “Search Term” we got a lot of search keywords for “15-0-Docs” which is one of the URL parameters for our separate search engines, not the term folks were searching for. If I drill down on the 15-0-Docs link in the report, I can see the keyword parameter, but it’s not an easy scan.
I can re-run reports using only the dates where I had corrected that problem, and then the Search Terms are more accurate. The main thing I want to keep doing now is continue to collect data!
I have sent out early reports to other writers and to our product managers when it seems useful for learning what our users are searching for.
I’d love to hear from other help authors – what are you doing with reports about search terms? These questions lifted straight from Google Analytics seem like a good start.
Visits: Who searched and when?
- When did visitors use site search?
- How do visitors who searched compare to those who didn’t?
Search: What did visitors search for?
- Which search terms did visitors use?
- Which categories did visitors search?
Content: Where did visitors search?
- Where did visitors start their searches?
- Which pages did visitors find?
Now, what would you do with the answers to these questions? How would you redesign your site or content based on the answers? I’m going to dive deeper into those two questions with the information I keep collecting.