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Jan. 17, 2025
Allison Miriani
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Digital marketers work to bring visitors to their company’s website. Then, they focus on whether those visitors are sticking around: What are the bounce rates? What is the average time on the website?
Digital marketers historically have not paid much attention to what visitors are searching for once on a website. But there’s a shift happening as marketers and SEO specialists begin to understand the importance of site search metrics.
Site search metrics show exactly what a visitor is searching for within a website. If marketers know how to find them, these important data points can help teams improve website performance and audience engagement. It helps teams identify opportunities to enhance existing content and shape future content strategies based on what visitors are looking for.
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the most prevalent tool that companies use to view website metrics and search analytics.
Although GA4 offers some site search metrics, the feature needs to be enabled before it will start measuring any user activity. Additionally, GA4 requires marketers to create custom reports or dashboards to view site search data.
You can also get this search data by using a special-built site search tool, such as SearchStax Site Search. SearchStax Site Search powers the search feature within a website, allows companies to personalize search results for users and includes a robust site search analytics dashboard.
Pictured is a website search results page powered by SearchStax Site Search. Website visitors can search for content on the website using the search bar at the top. The most relevant results are then populated below.
SearchStax Site Search’s analytics dashboard allows marketers to review their site search data at a glance and also dive into full details for a broader picture of users’ wants and where the website results may fall short.
Both GA4 and a built-for site search tool allow marketers to uncover insights that can improve their website, though there are key differences in the available metrics and ease of use. Here is a comparison between the two.
GA4 Site Search is a feature that enables website owners to track and analyze the search behavior of users on their site, with some advanced capabilities compared to previous versions. By integrating Site Search into GA4, administrators can gain insights into what visitors are looking for within their website.
The Site Search dashboard in GA4 shows an overview of a website’s search functionality, including search terms and sessions.
However, GA4 requires marketers to create custom reports or dashboards to view site search data. This increases the complexity for less-experienced users. You’ll also need to enable Enhanced Measurement and ensure that Google can accurately track your site search queries and results.
Keep in mind, these are the possibilities for site search metrics in GA4; as shown above, any analytics the user wants to include have to be included and formatted manually.
Site Search includes key site search metrics in an easy-to-understand dashboard. This comes standard with Site Search and is set up during customer onboarding with an implementation specialist. The specialist can demonstrate all the site search metrics and explain further what insights you can learn from the data.
The Site Search Analytics dashboard shares similar metrics with GA4 and gives you a deeper understanding of how users are engaging with the search results. It also provides more details than GA4, with the ability to click further into each metric to get very granular with the insights.
As you can see below, both GA4 and SearchStax Site Search offer benefits for digital marketers looking to understand and improve their website content. Because Site Search was built as a site search tool first and foremost, it is more user friendly and provides more in-depth search-focused metrics. This includes site search click-through rate to measure important engagement behavior, searches that yield no results to identify content gaps and more.
Metric | Google Analytics | SearchStax Site Search |
Sessions with Search | Y | Y |
Total Unique Searches | Y | Y |
Results Pageviews/Search | Y | Y |
% Search Exits | Y | Y |
% Search Refinements | Y | Y |
Clickthrough Rate | – | Y |
Number of Searches Without Results | – | Y |
Search Terms that had No Results | – | Y |
Start Page and What was Searched | Y | – |
Search Terms and Destination Page | Y | Y |
Content Metrics for Items | – | Y |
While GA4 Site Search analytics is powerful and integrates seamlessly with other website analytics, it has limitations compared to other site search solutions. Here are the advantages of using a dedicated site search tool:
1. Depth of Search-Specific Insights
Dedicated site search solutions offer deeper analytics tailored specifically to search behavior. For instance, they provide detailed insights into ranking performance, click-through rates for individual results and relevance metrics.
GA4 focuses on broader user behavior and lacks specialized reporting on how well search algorithms meet user needs.
2. Advanced Relevance and Ranking Analytics
Dedicated search solutions allow you to analyze and adjust relevance tuning, such as understanding why certain results rank higher or refining algorithms to prioritize specific content. SearchStax Site Search solution allows you to make adjustments easily in a matter of a few clicks.
GA4 doesn’t provide this level of granularity, leaving gaps in optimizing search performance.
3. Personalization Insights
Dedicated site search solutions often provide robust personalization capabilities, such as tracking individual user preferences or tailoring search results based on behavior.
GA4 aggregates data and lacks the personalization-focused metrics that a dedicated solution might offer.
4. Customization for Reporting
While GA4 offers customizable dashboards, dedicated site search tools typically provide pre-built, search-specific reports and visualizations that are more directly actionable for improving search functionality. SearchStax Site Search dashboard is optimized to inform fast action for marketing and digital experience professionals.
Building equivalent reports in GA4 may require significant manual setup and customization.
5. Query-Level Analysis
GA4’s search analytics often focus on aggregate metrics, while dedicated solutions allow granular analysis of individual queries, including no results searches, user intent and query reformulation trends.
6. Integration with Search Indexes and Tools
Dedicated search solutions integrate directly with search indexes and management tools, allowing administrators to tune indexes, add synonyms and manually curate results. SearchStax makes this process easy, allowing users to promote items with a few simple clicks and speeds up synonym curation with AI-powered Smart Match assist.
GA4 does not interact directly with the search engine, limiting the ability to implement immediate changes.
7. No Direct Feedback Loop
Dedicated solutions often incorporate user feedback loops, such as click tracking that feeds directly into relevance models.
GA4 provides data but requires separate workflows to implement feedback-based adjustments. This can be a heavy lift for non-technical users in marketing and digital experience teams who have to wait on IT/development team members to configure these settings.
Site Search provides marketers and website owners with the opportunity to improve the search function of their website easily and without any developer assistance. This includes AI-powered features to add related searches, address common misspellings, boost promotions for certain keywords and more.
Although Google Analytics is a great tool to have in your tool belt, the fact that Site Search was built with site search metrics in mind is key.
SearchStax Site Search offers benefits for digital marketers looking to understand and improve their website content with full transparency into their visitor behavior. It’s all about gaining the agility to respond to fast-changing visitor demands.
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