How to Use Google Analytics Site Search Reports

How to Use Google Analytics Site Search Reports

If your website has a search bar, you need to ensure you’re making the most of this valuable report in Google Analytics. It’s quick to set up and can soon be giving you all sorts of insights and ideas that you may never have had without it.

The Site Search report is found under Behavior and is focused on recording how people interact with the search functionality on your website. This is actually even more valuable since organic keywords started appearing as “(not provided)”, as this report shows what people have actually typed, even if it is on your site instead of into Google – it’s likely that there are overlaps!

Setting Up Site Search Reports

To set this report up, navigate to the Admin, then the View Settings for your chosen profile and scroll down to the Site Search Settings section. Here you just click the button to turn it on and then type or paste in the query that your website uses in search parameters. For example, searching on this site gives you a results URL that looks like this:

http://searchenginewatch.com/search?q=analytics

In this example, the “q” is the search parameter, so this is what would go in the field here:

You will find a tick box under this option which gives you the choice to strip parameters out of the URL. If that was ticked for Search Engine Watch all search results URLs would show in the content reports under /search, whereas without ticking it each search will generate a URL with the query included, which will break out the results and not allow you to see the data for search results pages in one row in the content report.

There are benefits to both methods, so it will depend on your reporting and website setup as to which choice will work best for you.

To get an even more detailed breakdown of data in the reports you can also specify categories, if that applies to your website. Here you pop in each category parameter and you will have a report available to group activity together within these.

Site Search Reports

The Overview report, much like any other, gives you a summary of the data relevant to that report. In this case it gives you a clear percentage of how many visits on your website included the use of the search functionality as well as how the interaction played out following the search.

Usage

This report has two rows of data, one for visits with site search and one for visits which did not include the use of the search functionality. This allows you to directly compare the success rate of people using search against those who don’t to work out whether the conversion rates are very different, whether new visitors are more likely to be using the search box, or how much revenue you have generated by people using this option.

All standard metrics are available and the Site Usage, Goals, and E-Commerce reports are easily accessible above the graph so you can drill into the most relevant report for your site.

Search Terms:

This is where it gets very interesting! The words and phrases that your visitors have used in your search box are recorded here so that you can work out what people are looking for on your website. Each query used is shown alongside search usage metrics but Goal and E-Commerce reports are also available.

There are many uses for this report. Some examples include:

• How many pages it took for people to find what they wanted
• How many visitors gave up and left the website
• Which keywords did not have good enough results so users had to refine their terms
• How persistent visitors were with their query, by how many pages of results they looked through
• Most common queries
• Trends and identifying new searches which can help you identify products to stock or content to write about
• Identifying common misspellings or other ways to phrase something
• Which areas of the site people choose to search for over navigating through a menu for
• Which queries lead to users being engaged with the website
• Queries that have good conversion rates

As mentioned above, this data can also be broken down by category, so if you have set this up, click the link above the data table for “Site Search Category” and you will be able to see this data.

Pages

The Pages report in this area is all about which pages of the website the user was on when they made the search. If you see (entrance) under this report, your visitors are entering the website on a search results page, which may be caused by marketing activity or natural search results using search URLs.

Sometimes the Pages report can be useful for working out which pages are the ones on which visitors give up on using the navigation and switch to a different method of using the website.

Clicking the “Destination Page” link above the data takes you to a report showing where users went on the website following a search.

Useful Tips

If you have the opportunity to do so, I encourage you to set this tracking up for your website. It’s your prerogative to know what’s going on within your website and what it is that people want or cannot find.

Here are some extra ideas to take away for this area in Google Analytics:

• International Comparisons: It is interesting to see the take-up of search functionality on websites around the world. The percentage of visits with search can vary dramatically from country to country, so do ensure you focus on the most suitable website navigation methods for your users.
• Language Use Globally: Also on the topic of international data, when you have a website specific to another country or language, you will benefit from keeping a close eye on the language used in search queries, as this can help you identify hard-to-translate items that people cannot find or terms that you can use an English version for as it may be more widely used than a local language.
• Internal Campaign Tracking: An out-of-the-box idea for tracking internal banners by Justin Cutroni is to tag them with parameters that you can analyze in search reports instead of resorting to using campaign tracking tags on internal links, which is not recommended. 

Top 5 Mistakes to Avoid When Using Google Analytics with Site Search

There is a wealth of information in Google Analytics, helping website owners gain a deeper understanding of who’s visiting their site and how often; what they click on and their navigation path; and what pages or links lead to particular outcomes like downloads or purchases. Google Analytics shows how effective site search is in generating clickthroughs and conversions, shopping cart abandonment rates and more.

However, without knowing how to interpret the data and what it’s telling you, you’re not getting the whole picture. For example, you might put too much attention on raw totals, when it makes more sense to look for trends or compare different segments of data. Or, you might inadvertently exclude traffic that you should keep measuring.

The engineers I work with have developed a useful list of common mistakes that website owners make when using Google Analytics and site search, along with guidance for better understanding of what’s happening on your site.

Mistake #1: Trusting that your site search statistics are correct. 

By default, Google Analytics tracks every page against the URL of the page loaded. Assuming that your search page has the URL “http://sub.domain.com/search?w=keyword” Google Analytics tracks the page as “/search?w=keyword.”

When setting up site search reporting, you specify the query parameter that defines a search page view. In the above case, the query parameter value would be “w.” This means that any URL on your site that contains the query parameter “w=xyz” will be tagged as a site search page view.

The problem here is that this query parameter may exist on non-site search pages. It’s not always easy to see that these pages exist. There could be non-site search pages that have this query parameter in the URL – which means site search reports may not be accurate, and you will not get a clear picture of how site search is performing.

The solution is to use advanced segments instead, since they’ll allow you to be more specific about the site search segmentation and will give you the platform to be more precise about identifying visits with a site search page view. For example, you can say something like: “Include pages that begin with /search” or “Include pages that contain the query parameter w.”

It’s also a good idea to avoid using site search URLs in your navigation and/or PPC campaigns. Get a different URL structure for the same page setup, such as http://sub.domain.com/ppc/keyword or http://sub.domain.com/nav/brand/nike/0.

Mistake #2: Focusing on the totals. Google Analytics will always under report results, given that it is focused on JavaScript tracking. Therefore, results don’t take into account that there is a small percentage of site visitors who will click away before allowing the page to load long enough for the tracking code to fire. There are also site visitors who will have JavaScript and/or cookies disabled.

Thus, you shouldn’t be too concerned with exact results. Instead, focus on trends and comparing different segments of data (e.g. visits with site search versus visits without site search) or time periods (e.g. visits with search in June compared to July).

Mistake #3: Forgetting about AJAX. The AJAX programming language has become ubiquitous on the web in recent years, since it allows site visitors to load content without reloading an entire web page. You’ll often see AJAX used for search results so that users can quickly access more results without waiting for new pages to load.

Before the widespread use of AJAX, if a user wanted to click on a new page of results or perhaps select different refinements, the page would have to be loaded again and the Google Analytics code would have tracked it as another page view. But with AJAX, these interactions on your site are no longer tracked. It has become common to use virtual page views or event tracking depending on what you are trying to track.

Source: searchenginewatch.com/
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What is Digital (online) Marketing? How it matters?

What is Digital (online) Marketing? How it matters?

In Marketing your goals of your business is satisfying your customers and keep them. In this process you also create customers and get your feedback internally for your product/service or process improvements.

Digital marketing is the word now online users and company owners are mostly using nowadays. It is the process to delivered over a digital channel, especially the internet as medium of your business process and goal.

Digital marketing is the en route to create strong online presence of your business, company, product or services and a fan page. There are 77.6% of small business owners,  entrepreneurs, freelancers and corporate using social media in their digital marketing strategy.

Digital marketing strategies:

1. Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO or search engine optimization is the process to reach customers in a organic way by making manual work such as on page and off page submissions. This means your business will be shown in Search engine result pages, when someone search your business with particular keywords or products / services. There are lot of search engine optimization agency doing the best work for their customers.

2. Search engine marketing (SEM)

Search engine marketing is a process, using paid and unpaid services to promote the business. By using paid advertisements businesses that will appear on search engine results pages. When buyers or sellers looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the opportunity to visit their ads by appearing alongside search results for those search particular queries.

Strategies are SEO and PPC.

3. Content marketing

Ii is a marketing process by creating and sharing relevant and high quality content basis on accurate audience. And eventually this will drive customers and will make strong relationship to take a profitable action.

This content might be as blog posts, articles, white papers, webinars, e-magazines, case studies, research papers/reports, infographics, email newsletters, videos, and e-books.

4. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

It is the process, using social media platforms to promote and sell your products/services.

Best Social media platforms to advertise on social channels are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. By using this you can choose your potential audience and make number of reach and leads according to your budget.

5. Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) or Google Advertising

PPC or Pay per Click or Google advertising is the advertisement service by Google. Using this ads you can get no. of visitors or leads according to your target or Budget.

6. Email marketing

Email marketing is the more competitive at same time very effective and direct form of digital marketing strategy.

There are 82% of B2B and B2C businesses use email marketing today. Before you create an email campaign, you need to understand the psychology of your potential customers.

By email marketing, For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 on an average, and Over 34% of people worldwide use email.

It is the way to keep your customers informed about new sales or promotions you are running, and updated on your brand,  product and services, and offer coupons to encourage customers.

Conclusion of Digital marketing

There are lot of tools available for digital marketing for faster results. But mostly manual work or submission give the better and quality results. Before contacting for digital marketing or any strategies under these please consult the best consultant and make your budget.

Source: https://way2websoftblog.wordpress.com/2018/09/18/what-is-digital-online-marketing-how-it-matters/

What is web hosting? How it Works??

What is web hosting? How it Works??

Web Hosting

Web hosting is a service that permits business and people to feed a web site or website onto the web. A web host, or web hosting service provider, may be a business that has the technologies and services required for the web site or webpage to be viewed within the net. Websites are stored, on special computers known as servers.

How Web Hosting Works

Before we tend to start is that you simply will get everything you would like from only one trafficker (domain, DNS, and hosting) that may be a convenient thanks to dig done. For our example we’ll assume you’re doing it all singly tho’, as it’ll facilitate illustrate however all of the items work along.

Domain Names

Getting a domain name is very easy if you know the domain registrar like way2websoft.

Every computer on the Internet has a unique number. It’s called an IP address. It’s like a phone number for each computer. That’s oversimplified, but it works for our purposes. A domain name is like an alias for that IP address…a more memorable way of identifying a computer on the Internet.

Every system on the web encompasses a distinctive range. It’s referred to as IP address. It’s sort of a sign for every computer. However it works for our functions. A website name is like associate for that IPs… a lot of memory manner of distinguishing a system on the web.

Nameservers (or DNS)

Setting up nameservers or DNS for domain name.

DNS is commonly used acronym which means Domain Name System or Domain Name Servers.

Hosting

Actually website is collection of files. HTML files, CSS files (stylesheets), pictures and photos, etc. All of those files ought to be in an exceedingly folder on a system that’s connected to the web. That computer is typically referred to “server” as a result of it serves our web site files once visitors come. After you pay a corporation to place your files on their net server, you’re shopping for hosting. They’re hosting your web site on their servers. That’s called Web Hosting.

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How to Choose Good Digital Marketing or SEO Training Institutes in India?

Tips to Choose Good and Best Digital Marketing or SEO Training Institute

There are few details you need to pay attention before choosing the best digital marketing and SEO training institute in major cities(Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad and so on). Here are few tips that will help you to do so:

1. Your SEO Trainer or Digital Marketing Trainer:

The first important thing to be noted while choosing the best SEO training institute or digital marketing training centers is the expertise of your trainer. So all you need to be concerned about is the search engine techniques, digital marketing, pay per click and social media your trainer will be covering in the training program. One tip to learn about the trainer is to check online profiles such as Facebook, LinkedIn and so on of your trainer. You need to ensure that your trainer has an active online entity as SEO and internet marketing is all about promoting products and services online.

2. The position of your training institute’s primary keywords in search engines

SEO helps websites to rank better in search engines. This implies that your institute should rank better in all the search engines, right? So the simple method is to check if the institute’s primary keywords appear within the top three search results. For example, for SEO training in Chennai, when you search for the term “SEO training institutes in Chennai” or “Chennai SEO Training” or “SEO training in Chennai”, your training institute’s website need to appear within the top search results. If this is the case, it means that your people excel in their business and you can check in social media presence and other stuffs. for the same factors we need to analyze for searching digital marketing institutes.

3. Experience in training

It is always wise to choose training centers that are there in this field for maximum number of years. This is because they would have established their credibility already. However this does not mean that the new training institutes are bad. A group of Digital Marketing professional or SEO experts who were professionally doing their digital marketing and search engine optimization may decide to launch a training institute.

4. Read testimonials from past trainees

It is best if you could contact the previous trainees of the training institute you are about to choose. But when you do so, try to contact as many people as possible. If you are unable to contact them directly, try to read their testimonials in Google. At least one or two might have published their experience in the training institute. If many people recommend the institute, go for it.

5. Training Fees

There are few Digital Marketing or SEO training centers charging very high fees claiming that they are the best in the town. Such centers even charge about twenty five thousand rupees for a one week course. On the other hand, few other centers offer reasonable rates ranging from seven thousand to fifteen thousand rupees a week. However, fees structure of a training institute should be considered depending on the quality of the course and the duration.

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