Search plays an increasingly important role in the way that the Internet is used. Find out how this relates to your website using Search Filters.
Search filtering covers two distinct methods of filtering data. One relates to searches performed on your website, using your site’s local search engine; the other relates to searches using internet search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN Search.
Searches within your own site
Filtering data based on usage of your site’s own search engine allows you to monitor the behaviour of users that use specific search terms. It may be that you are interested in whether the work that you have put into tuning your search engine for such search terms as product names, actually pays of in terms of guiding users to the correct pages, and, eventually, to completing a purchase.
It is also possible to monitor the behaviour of users who did use your search engine, and those that did not, by using a wildcard match for any search term. Does the behaviour of users that used your site's search engine differ from users that did not?
Searches on internet-wide search engines
Filtering data according to which search terms were used on internet search engines enables you to monitor the performance of search terms that create the greatest returns.
By combining search filtering with some of the other filtering criteria, you are able to do advanced comparisons to aid your analysis substantially.
For example, you are able to compare the returns of visits that used the same search term in two different search engines by setting up to filters: one for Search engine 1, and one for search engine 2. Combining the search filtering with the Referrer filter and the Page Visits filter enables you to compare traffic that came from referrer A (e.g. google.com), using a specific search term, and included a visit to your site’s Purchase Confirmation page, with traffic that came from referrer B (e.g. yahoo.com) that included the same actions.
Similarly, you are able to compare the performance of different search terms on the same search engine, so that you can focus your marketing resources on areas that provide the greatest returns.
An important feature with the filtering system is that filters can be applied anywhere in the SiteAnalyze system, including the Reports module. This enables you to run regular comparative reports, using related filters to compare performance in different areas of your site.