Google Instant Search is now live for those logged into their Google account.
The key difference between instant and the old search is that the visitor does not need to type their whole search term as Google will make intelligent suggestions based on the first few key strokes.
The good news is that this doesn’t affect the keyword field in Google Analytics – the whole keyword is still collected rather than just the initial characters.
What we can see though is how much of that search term was typed by the visitor. This will be particularly useful in diagnosing bounce rate if certain terms are frequently misinterpreted by Google.
There will probably be a new metric in Google Analytics soon to show this variable, but in the meantime you can capture it yourself and keep ahead of the game by using a custom filter to push the part-keyword into one of the custom variables available to you.
This works because Google inserts the partial search string into the referring URL. So for example if I search for ‘analytics eva’ but never finish typing, the URL would be caught under the variable ‘oq’, shown here in red:
To capture this automatically, set up a new profile in Google Analytics, eg ‘Source: Google Instant search’ and implement the following two filters:
Click to see a larger version of this image
Click to see a larger version of this image
Sit back, wait a few hours, and then you should be able to see these partial search terms under the user defined value metric in reports. Results with “(not set)” in the field indicate that the visitor did not use Google Instant on this visit. These are early days but I think we can expect these numbers to grow substantially.
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About the author: Dan Huddart is a web analytics professional, specialising in obtaining business insight from Google and Adobe/Omniture analytics solutions. Read more from this author
Dan,
Useful post.
Hope you dont mind me suggesting some improvements to the RegEx, as this can be done in one filter rather than two…
Referral: [?#&]oq=([^&]+)&
Campaign source: ^google$
Output user-defined: $A1
[field B required ticked]
Or just:
Referral: ^https?://.+\.google\..{2,8}?/.*[?#&]oq=([^&]+)&
Output user-defined: $A1
Thanks
Phil.
Great Post! It will be interesting to see how things roll out with Google Instant!
Dan,
Here is the RegEx for tracking GooglePlus referrals in GA.
Note: GooglePlus uses a Meta 200status redirect for all posted links in a users feed stream. This filter matches to that referral pattern…
1. Google Plus Tracking – part1
Referral=^http://www.google.com/url?sa=z.*&url=
Source=google_plus
2. Google Plus Tracking – part2
Source=^google_plus$
Medium=social_media
Cheers
Phil.