I’m not entirely sure if this is a new feature or not, but I use analytics all the time (and if you don’t, you should promptly head over and sign up for an account), and I don’t remember seeing it until just a few minutes ago. It appears Google now has a new analytics section where you can track internal searches on your blog. So while Google Analytics already shows you how other people are reaching your site from Google, you can now see how people are navigating within your site based on searches within your blogging platform.
To configure it, you have to go edit your website profile from the Google Analytics dashboard. Edit your main website profile and enable the in-site search capabilities.
It will ask you for a custom search parameter which it will use to determine whether or not a search is being done. I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to be, but since searches in WordPress occur by passing a “s=” parameter to the website, I suspect it wants a single “s” in that field.
So, I just enabled mine, and we’ll see what goodies it brings in the coming days. If you know what the search parameters are for other platforms such as Drupal, drop me an email or a comment and I’ll update the post.
Obviously being able to see what people are routinely searching for on your website (along with what they do after they hit a search page) is a pretty cool feature that should like web-site owners fine-tune content a bit better for usability.
Apparently Google Analytics search query analysis doesn’t yet work with Drupal, because Drupal does not use query URLs for search. That is, searching looks like http://example.com/search/node/monkey instead of http://example.com/blog/?s=monkey as with WordPress. I’m sure Drupal and Google blame each other for this.
There’s now a patch for the Drupal 6 version of the Google Analytics module which might provide support for tracking internal searches.