Having Issue with Site Search in Analytics
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Hi Mozzers,
We launched a website in October 2012 and have added in the settings(Google analytics) of that profile "Do Track Site Search" since we have a search box on the website. The site search report worked for 10 days and it was over(from end of december till beginning of January 2013). Since then I have been trying to understand this issue. I have added all the query search terms possible, but still not showing any signs of life.
At this point I am not sure what to do? Some Help would be appreciated!
Search URL= subdomain.example.com**/search/node/**....
Thanks!
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Hi,
I assume your subdomain is tracking and you are seeing the unmodified search urls in your analytics site content data and it is just the internal site search tracking that is not working?
So in the link above (assuming the js is all correct, I have not tested it) you would need something like this if the search URL looks like: subdomain.example.com**/search/node/keyword**
var s = location.pathname;
var re = new RegExp(“/search/node/([^/]*)/?$”);
var m = s.match(re);
pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/search/?q=’ + m[1]);What you are doing is getting the initial url, then setting up a regex to get anything after /search/node/ (your keywords in other words) and then pushing these keywords into a virtual page view that analytics can understand as a site search query. Worth noting that this code should only be on your search results page, not all pages of the site. if you have a dev environment you can make sure all the variables (s,re,m) are returning what you expect by just alerting them like: alert(s); etc etc.
This should give you virtual pageviews that you can actually see in your analytics site content reports that will look like /search/?q=YOURKEYWORDS, and if you see those then you just need to set up normal analytics site search tracking as you already had with q as your variable.
It may be easier to do it in php or whatever language your site is coded in, the issue is to isolate the search keywords in whatever way is easiest for you and then do the virtual page view in analytics with the pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/search/?q=YOUR_KEY_WORDS');
Hope that helps!
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Hi guys,
Unfortunately I don't have any programming knowledge so I am having an issue understanding what I need to use as a regex for the javascript modification here
"var s = location.pathname;
var re = new RegExp(“/search/([^/]*)/?$”);
var m = s.match(re);
pageTracker._trackPageview(‘/search/?q=’ + m[1]);
*Assuming the results page is in the format http://www.mysite.com/search/keyword
and further assuming my JavaScript and regex are even remotely accurate – meaning don’t just use this example code and expect it to work, this is to demonstrate the concept only"As I said the search URL looks like: subdomain.example.com**/search/node/keyword**
Thanks for your help
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thanks Lynn for your answer.
I'll try to follow the details you sent me.
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Hi,
Lynn is probably right, things don't stop working if nothing changes. If you would be able to share the site with us we can help you out probably.
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Hi,
If it worked for a few days then something must have changed after that. Maybe you went from a search url looking like /search?q=myterm to something like /search/myterm? To track site search without the query string in the url you need to do a bit of fiddling with analytics to create a virtual page view. See this page for details on setting it up. Worth mentioning also to make sure you are properly tracking your subdomain just in case.
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