Internal Search Terms and Site Exits

[jp_behrens]

Hello,

I'm looking for a way to track when users leave the site immediately after they perform an internal search - and I need this by search term. Similar to how Google Analytics has Search Exits number of searches a visitor made immediately before leaving the site.I hope somebody awesome can help out! I asked client care but still waiting on their response after almost a week.

Background: I can trend Site Exits at the Page Name Level with pathing reports. Basically I select my Search Results pagename and generate pathing flow report. I can see Site Exits from the Search Results page, not a problem. But now I need to go in deeper to determine which keywords are making users leave the site. 

I have a prop that only tracks internal search terms. When there is a new term the new one overwrites the old one. I also have pathing enabled in this prop that allows me to add some new metrics:

- Exits metric it doesn't really tell me someone left the site after they searched for a term. It just tells me that the term was the last term searched for

- Single Access metrics it just tells me that the term was the only term searched for

- Bounce metric I feel like this is the right metric... however the numbers are pretty low. It also doesn't make much sense because the total Bounces in this prop is higher than the total Entries... 

Hope this makes sense, and please let me know if you need further clarifications.

Thanks for your help in advance

[AdamGreco · Accepted solution]

There are a few ways you can do this.  Both are hacks, but should work:

#1 - On the Search Results page, use a new sProp and set it with the phrase "search results:[search term]" and substitute the search term where I have the brackets.  Then if the visitor goes to a next page, pass in the value "Did Not Bounce" to the same sProp.  Then enable pathing on this new sProp.  This should allow you to find the keyword you care about and then do a next page flow report and see the exit % for the keyword.

#2 - Create a new version of your s.pagename variable in which everything is the same, except in this version, the search results page has the search term concatenated to it like described in #1 above.  This should have a similar result as above, but will allow you to see where visitors went after each search term.  However, this will create a lot of page names, but it should be ok, since it is not your real page name variable, just a copy for this specific purpose.  Obviously, this new sProp requires that you enable Pathing.

There may be fancier ways to do this, but these are just some quick ideas off the top of my head...

[jp_behrens]

Hey Adam - thanks for the tip. At first I didn't understand if I would be able to see Site Exits in a table, so I could sort which terms have the most site exits and optimize Results for those. But this actually would work only if the Did Not Bounce value is set for any page that the customer goes to next, not only if users click on one of the results.

Only problem is I wouldn't be able to use Total Site Exits as the overall metric to gauge overall Results performance, because Did Not Bounce value will have Site Exits as well. Although I guess I could use the Site Exit from the Pages report for the Search Results page instead... It would require extracting the data into excel and building the report here.

[AdamGreco]

You would be able to see the top exiting search terms by opening the Exits report under Paths for this new sProp and filtering on terms that were concatenated together.  For example, if you concatenated "books|search results page" in the sProp vaues, you could do a text filter on "|" and find all those that were exits in descending order.  This assumes that you set the "did not bounce" value or passed page names on he page after the search results page...

[jp_behrens]

Or that...! Thanks

[AdamGreco]

Here is a blog post I wrote to help explain in more detail...

http://adam.webanalyticsdemystified.com/2014/02/17/onsite-search-term-exit-rates-sitecatalyst/