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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.
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.