Search analytics

The two screens of numbers, what each metric really means, and the revenue search brings in.

Search leaves a useful record: what visitors look for, what they find, where they click, what they buy next. The panel organises that into screens, from the most immediate to the most actionable.

Overview

The landing screen: the last 30 days, with no date picker, to answer "how is search doing" at a glance.

Four indicators, all with the change against the previous period:

• Searches: how many settled. It doesn't count keystrokes or intermediate states.
• Clicks: clicks on results.
• CTR: searches that led to at least one click. It's the metric that best sums up whether search is answering.
• No results: the percentage that came back empty. See searches with no results.

Plus the activity chart, the most searched terms and the ones that came back empty.

Search revenue

The Search revenue section shows up when the store shares its orders (a module option; see the installation):

• Attributed: there was a click on a result before the purchase. The lines of the clicked products are counted, not the whole order.
• Assisted: the session searched but bought without clicking.
• Per search: the revenue divided by the searches in the period.

The "Searches that sell" table lists the terms with the most attributed revenue. It's the most direct measure of what search returns, and the one to use when somebody asks how much this is worth.

Warning The bridge between the search and the order is a cookie of our own (bk_sid), written only when somebody opens search. If the store requires cookie consent (an option on the store page), the cookie is only written with consent, and without it the orders from those sessions aren't attributed. That's the correct behaviour; it's worth keeping in mind when you read the numbers.

Analytics

The same ground with finer instruments:

• A window of your choice: today, 7, 30, 90 or 365 days, or a range.
• Filter by device.
• Five metrics: the four above plus conversion and average click position.
• Three daily charts and two sortable tables with CSV export: the searched terms and the clicked results, the latter with image, name and reference.

The average click position is the most underrated of the five. A search with a good CTR but a high average position means people do find it, but only after working through half a page; that's exactly what the weights and the rules fix.

Retention

The available window depends on the plan: each plan keeps a certain number of days of analytics, and asking for more than that shortens the window with a notice. Data older than the retention is deleted.

If you need to compare one month with the same month last year, export the CSV before retention takes it away.