Search analytics

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Search analytics is the use of search data to investigate particular interactions among Web searchers, the search engine, or the content during searching episodes. [1] The resulting analysis and aggregation of search engine statistics can be used in search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO). In other words, search analytics helps website owners understand and improve their performance on search engines based on the outcome. For example, identifying highly valuable site visitors [2] or understanding user intent. [3] Search analytics includes search volume trends and analysis, reverse searching (entering websites to see their keywords), keyword monitoring, search result and advertisement history, advertisement spending statistics, website comparisons, affiliate marketing statistics, multivariate ad testing, etc. [4]

Contents

Data collection

Search analytics data can be collected in several ways. Search engines provide access to their own data with services such as Google Analytics, [5] Google Trends, and Google Insights. Third-party services must collect their data from ISP's, phoning home software, or from scraping search engines. Getting traffic statistics from ISP's and phone homes provides for broader reporting of web traffic in addition to search analytics. Services that perform keyword monitoring only scrape a limited set of search results, depending on their clients' needs. Services providing reverse search, however, must scrape a large set of keywords from the search engines, usually in the millions, to find the keywords that everyone is using. [6]

Since search results, especially advertisements, differ depending on where you are searching from, data collection methods have to account for geographic location. Keyword monitors do this more easily since they typically know what location their client is targeting. However, to get an exhaustive reverse search, several locations need to be scraped for the same keyword.

Accuracy

Search analytics accuracy depends on service being used, data collection method, and data freshness. Google releases its own data, but only in an aggregated way and often without assigning absolute values such as number of visitors to its graphs. [7] ISP logs and phone home methods are accurate for the population they sample, so sample size and demographics must be adequate to accurately represent the larger population. Scraping results can be highly accurate, especially when looking at the non-paid, organic search results. Paid results, from Google AdWords for example, [8] are often different for the same search depending on the time, geographic location, and history of searches from a particular computer. This means that scraping advertisers can be hit or miss.

Market conditions

Taking a look at Google Insights to gauge the popularity of these services shows that compared to searches for the term AdWords (Google's popular search ad system), use of search analytics services is still very low, around 1-25% as of Oct. 2009. [9] This could point to a large opportunity for the users and makers of search analytics given that services have existed since 2004 with several new services being started since.

Calculations

Sessions with Search = The number of sessions that used your site's search function at least once.
Percentage of sessions that used internal search = Sessions with Search / Total Sessions.
Total Unique Searches = The total number of times your site search was used. This excludes multiple searches on the same keyword during the same session.
Results Pageviews / Search = Pageviews of search result pages / Total Unique Searches.
Search Exits = The number of searches made immediately before leaving the site.
Percentage of Search Exits = Search Exits / Total Unique Searches
Search Refinements = The number of times a user searched again immediately after performing a search.
Percentage Search Refinements = The percentage of searches that resulted in a search refinement. Calculated as Search Refinements / Pageviews of search result pages.
Time after Search = The amount of time users spend on your site after performing a search. This is calculated as Sum of all search_duration across all searches / (search_transitions + 1)
Search Depth = The number of pages viewed after performing a search. This is calculated as Sum of all search_depth across all searches / (search_transitions + 1) [10]

See also

Related Research Articles

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines. SEO targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic. Unpaid traffic may originate from different kinds of searches, including image search, video search, academic search, news search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexa Internet</span> American web traffic analysis company (1996–2022)

Alexa Internet, Inc. was an American web traffic analysis company based in San Francisco. It was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amazon.

Web traffic is the data sent and received by visitors to a website. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. Sites monitor the incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor this traffic, and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Ads</span> Online advertising platform owned by Google

Google Ads is an online advertising platform developed by Google, where advertisers bid to display brief advertisements, service offerings, product listings, and videos to web users. It can place ads in the results of search engines like Google Search, mobile apps, videos, and on non-search websites. Services are offered under a pay-per-click (PPC) pricing model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yahoo Native</span> Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo

Yahoo! Native is a native "Pay per click" Internet advertising service provided by Yahoo.

Pay-per-click (PPC) is an internet advertising model used to drive traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher when the ad is clicked.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to enhance pay per click (PPC) listings and increase the Call to action (CTA) on the website.

In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another page pointing to the page in question.

Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of web data to understand and optimize web usage. Web analytics is not just a process for measuring web traffic but can be used as a tool for business and market research and assess and improve website effectiveness. Web analytics applications can also help companies measure the results of traditional print or broadcast advertising campaigns. It can be used to estimate how traffic to a website changes after launching a new advertising campaign. Web analytics provides information about the number of visitors to a website and the number of page views, or creates user behavior profiles. It helps gauge traffic and popularity trends, which is useful for market research.

Local search is the use of specialized Internet search engines that allow users to submit geographically constrained searches against a structured database of local business listings. Typical local search queries include not only information about "what" the site visitor is searching for but also "where" information, such as a street address, city name, postal code, or geographic coordinates like latitude and longitude. Examples of local searches include "Hong Kong hotels", "Manhattan restaurants", and "Dublin car rental". Local searches exhibit explicit or implicit local intent. A search that includes a location modifier, such as "Bellevue, WA" or "14th arrondissement", is an explicit local search. A search that references a product or service that is typically consumed locally, such as "restaurant" or "nail salon", is an implicit local search.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Analytics</span> Web analytics service from Google

Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic and also mobile app traffic & events, currently as a platform inside the Google Marketing Platform brand. Google launched the service in November 2005 after acquiring Urchin.

A search engine results page (SERP) is a webpage that is displayed by a search engine in response to a query by a user. The main component of a SERP is the listing of results that are returned by the search engine in response to a keyword query.

Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and Flickr. It is an enhanced version of web search that combines traditional algorithms. The idea behind social search is that instead of ranking search results purely based on semantic relevance between a query and the results, a social search system also takes into account social relationships between the results and the searcher. The social relationships could be in various forms. For example, in LinkedIn people search engine, the social relationships include social connections between searcher and each result, whether or not they are in the same industries, work for the same companies, belong the same social groups, and go the same schools, etc.

In Internet marketing, search advertising is a method of placing online advertisements on web pages that show results from search engine queries. Through the same search-engine advertising services, ads can also be placed on Web pages with other published content.

Keyword research is a practice search engine optimization (SEO) professionals use to find and analyze search terms that users enter into search engines when looking for products, services, or general information. Keywords are related to search queries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geotargeting</span> Website content based on a visitors location

In geomarketing and internet marketing, geotargeting is the method of delivering different content to visitors based on their geolocation. This includes country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, or other criteria. A common usage of geotargeting is found in online advertising, as well as internet television with sites such as iPlayer and Hulu. In these circumstances, content is often restricted to users geolocated in specific countries; this approach serves as a means of implementing digital rights management. Use of proxy servers and virtual private networks may give a false location.

SpyFu is an American search analytics company based out of Scottsdale, Arizona.

A number of metrics are available to marketers interested in search engine optimization. Search engines and software creating such metrics all use their own crawled data to derive at a numeric conclusion on a website's organic search potential. Since these metrics can be manipulated, they can never be completely reliable for accurate and truthful results.

Local search engine optimization is similar to (national) SEO in that it is also a process affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a web search engine's unpaid results often referred to as "natural", "organic", or "earned" results. In general, the higher ranked on the search results page and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users; these visitors can then be converted into customers. Local SEO, however, differs in that it is focused on optimizing a business's online presence so that its web pages will be displayed by search engines when users enter local searches for its products or services. Ranking for local search involves a similar process to general SEO but includes some specific elements to rank a business for local search.

Search engine scraping is the process of harvesting URLs, descriptions, or other information from search engines. This is a specific form of screen scraping or web scraping dedicated to search engines only.

References

  1. ↑ Jansen, B. J. 2006. Search log analysis: What is it; what's been done; how to do it. Library and Information Science Research, 28(3), 407-432.
  2. ↑ Ortiz-Cordova, A. and Jansen, B. J. (2012) Classifying Web Search Queries in Order to Identify High Revenue Generating Customers. Journal of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology 63(7), 1426 – 1441.
  3. ↑ Rose, D.E., & Levinson, D. (2004). Understanding user goals in web search. In S. Feldman, M. Uretsky, M. Najork, & C. Wills (Eds.). Proceedings of the World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’04) (pp. 13–19),. New York: ACM
  4. ↑ Felix, R., Rauschnabel, P.A.; Hinsch, C. (2016). "Elements of Strategic Social Media Marketing: A Holistic Framework". Journal of Business Research. 70: 118–126. doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.05.001.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. ↑ "Analytics Tools & Solutions for Your Business - Google Analytics". marketingplatform.google.com. Retrieved 2018-09-03.
  6. ↑ Das, Abhishek (2018-06-02). APPLICATION OF DIGITAL MARKETING FOR LIFE SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. BPB Publications. ISBN   978-93-87284-84-5.
  7. ↑ "About Google Trends – Google Trends" . Retrieved 2012-07-09.
  8. ↑ "Install Google Toolbar - Toolbar Help". support.google.com. Retrieved 2022-11-12.
  9. ↑ "Google Trends" . Retrieved 2012-12-30.
  10. ↑ Google Analytics: How Site Search metrics are calculated?
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