Site Search Tracking Of Non Existing Products

[pulseseo]

I am working towards optimizing the site search box of an ecommerce website and I wish to track the keywords which users are searching but which are yielding no results. Please see the image for the same.

I wish to assimilate data on the same which would then allow me to add products which users are searching but which the site doesn't have. However my problem is that I don't know how you could obtain this data in analytics because these results manifest itself in the form of searchresults.php.

I know that analyzing search refinements and percentage of exits in Google Analytics is an option but I want a more compact and simpler solution to the problem where I could see exactly all the data in one place. Does anyone have suggestions on how this can be done? Thanks in advance,

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[pulseseo]

I understand that optimizing the site search box for the right pages is crucial but my question is how do you track the searches that are returning 0 results. For example, is there a code which I could implement for the page that returns no results.

Again this would be a dynamic page and therefore I won't be able to track it in analytics. I want a system where I get compact data so that I could include products which my site doesn't have provided the search volume of that product is large.

[inhouseninja]

I've seen this done on a project I worked on before.

First, we logged every query that returned 0 results with a little bit of PHP code. The code wrote to a .txt file that was easily readable.  After a month we had a significant amount of data.

The data was used to track what products were being searched for that weren't returning results. Then we used the data to decide if we should add those products or if our search wasn't returning proper results.  What we found was that many people searched for products that we did carry, but the search didn't return the proper results.  For instance, the search might not return a result if a search was for the BRAND of the item.  Though it should have, it didn't.  Also, a user might search for "widgets", but all the products were named "$brand $size widget". Because of the "s" at the end of the word our search would return 0 results, but we carried hundreds of widgets.

First we improved the search to pick up results of one character off.  Then we included any manufacturer / brands. We also had the search display results from the title of articles on our site.  This significantly improved the user experience and sales.

We then took the data left over and decided what the user was searching for and how to use that to our advantage.  Many users are too lazy to use the navigation on a website to find what they want.  If they search for "blue widgets" and 0 results display the users often assume we don't carry them - though we do.  So, this is a very good tactic to use to increase conversions.

It worked very well for us.   I hope this helps.