Depending on your site content, there may be a side of inbound search traffic you haven’t considered or quantified: image search. Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it, but after reading this blog post over at SEO blog BlindFiveYearOld.com, I’m interested in making this data a part of my normal rounds of site analysis. There is significant configuration required to get this analysis, and it is documented nicely in this post. It requires creating another profile within your existing Google Analytics setup, and also requires configuring filters, a worthy, but slightly intimidating tactic I first encountered when setting up cross-domain tracking with GA. Check out the post and open a new venue for search data to come into your purview!

PS – check out this simple Regex Cheat Sheet to help you configure filters and more in GA. (Side question: will SiteCatalyst ever support Regular Expressons?)

Amazingly I couldn’t find any writeups about how to modify VPASP to capture on site search keywords into Google Analytics or the http logfile, etc. So I decided to take a look at shopsearch.asp looking for opportunities for a quick mod. I quickly found the location to add one line of code so that I could pass the search term as a querystring parameter to the shopdisplayproducts.asp template (search results page).

On the system at hand, the location was on/about line 57:

Change line
responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems
to
responseredirect "shopdisplayproducts.asp?Search=Yes&sppp=" & howManyItems & "&kwd=" & allwordsString

So, what we’re doing here is passing the ‘allwordsString’ variable (the search term) as a query string parameter value to ‘kwd’. ‘kwd’ could be anything unique on your system, but you’ll need to add whatever you call ‘kwd’ to the Google Analytics Site Search query string parameter setup in order to capture the data. (Let me know if you need more help with that part.)

The next improvement on this mini-project will be to pass some data into Google Analytics so that failed searches (on site search where search term generates zero results) can be quantified. More on that later…..