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How to analyze your search analytics

Analyze your search analytics to gain a deeper understanding of your website and search experience.

There is a lot of data, so you may want to share it with your data and analytics team for deeper analysis and insights.

Review search terms

Review the search terms visitors use on your website on the Queries page in the Admin Center.

By default, this page lists the 1,000 most popular queries for the current month.

You can change the time period or search for specific terms by using the generate report option.

The table includes information about the number of queries, number of clicks, and click-through rate (CTR). The CTR is a metric that measures the percentage of people who click on a specific link after seeing it. Across all sites served by Search.gov, the average click-through rate is about 20%. A higher rate generally suggests that your content is relevant and engaging to your searchers.

You can also drill down into the clicks and referring URLs for each search term.

Review clicks

Review the pages searchers click on the Clicks page in the Admin Center.

By default, this page lists the 1,000 most clicked pages for the current month. You can change the time period by using the generate report option.

The table includes information about the pages clicked and number of clicks.

You can also drill down into the queries for each page.

Note that, if you are using our APIs, you must use the Clicks API to send clicks data into our system so it appears in these reports.

You can download a detailed spreadsheet with the raw data for any queries and clicks. 

The queries and clicks spreadsheets include the:

* Search term
* Date and time
* Content (modules) returned for the search
* Geographic location of the searcher
* Device, browser, and operating system

The clicks spreadsheet also includes the: 

* Clicked URL
* Position of the clicked URL on the results page
* Referring web page

Review referrers

Review the pages visitors are on when they search on the Referrers page in the Admin Center.

By default, this page lists the 1,000 most common pages visitors are on when they search for the current month. You can change the time period by using the generate report option.

The table includes information about the referring pages and number of queries.

You can also drill down into the queries for each referring page.

Review monthly reports

Visit the Monthly Reports page in the Admin Center for a snapshot of the total queries and clicks for the current month. You can change the time period by using the generate report option.

This page also includes information on the queries with no results and low click-through rates.

You can also download a detailed spreadsheet with the raw data for the month’s search terms, clicks, and click-through rates.

Connect third-party services

Third-party services (such as Google Tag Manager) often require you to place a script on your website to connect with their service.

You can add these scripts to your search results page by emailing the Search.gov team.

The team will add your script to your search results page.