This tutorial will show you how to track search queries on your Joomla site.

Often these queries can be a great source of information about what your visitors want:

• They show you what visitors can't find: If one search term is really popular, it might be because people can't find it using your current menus ... it might be time to add a new menu link.
• They show you what visitors really want: You may think people want "pink widgets" but search terms might show that people really want "blue widgets".

Technique for Low Traffic Sites

• In your Joomla administrator control panel go to Components > Search and click on the Options button at the right top corner:

• Set Gather Search Statistics to Yes.
• Click the Save & Close button.

• You should now see the "Gathering Statistics Enabled" message. Your Joomla site is now ready to collect and display search terms your site visitors use while searching at your site.

Technique for High Traffic Sites

You can also track what people search on your site using Google Analytics. This is a better option for sites that want to collect a lot of data.

Firstly, make sure:

1. You created an Analytics property for your site in GA
2. You set up tracking for your Joomla site

Now follow the instructions.

• Login to your Google Analytics account.
• Click on the "Admin" button:

1. Go to the View in which you want to set up site search:
2. Click on the View Settings:

• You should now see the "View Settings" panel with fields:

1. Find Site Search Tracking option and enable it.
2. Enter "searchword" (without double quotes) into the "Query parameter" field
3. Click on the "Strip query parameter out of URL" checkbox
4. Clic on the blue "Save" button:

• To take a look at your site searches, in your Google Analytics account, go to Reports (1) >> BEHAVIOUR (2) >> Site Search (3):

Congratulations! You now know how to track your Joomla website search queries. You learned to do it either with Joomla's core Search component or with Google Analytics.