Google Analytics "Site Search" with vBulletin search

Since we're all here to gather as much information as possible on how well our sites are doing, I find the following Google Analytics feature extremely interesting.

Google Analytics has a great feature these days which allows you to tracks internal site searches, and get some nice analytics in return.

I would love to see our forum searches hooked up to this, to get a better understanding what people are searching for, internally on our site.

Does anyone know how to achief this with vBulletin? GA looks for URL encoded search strings (ie: search?hl=en&q=Keywords+here), but since vBulletin uses a different technique, it would only be alternativly possible by feeding the google script like this : pageTracker._trackPageview('search?q=searchQueryHe re');

Any idea how I pass the entered search query also to the little GA script?


I found two links describing the technique used, which might be helpfull:

https://www.google.com/support/googl...75817&hl=en_US

Google Analytics Site Search | Wiki | ExpressionEngine


I've posted this question at vBulletin.com as well, but I guess vBSEO's forums has more people interested in stats & results, in order to "traffic tune" their websites

Have you discovered a solution yet? This would be a quite useful capability.

Still no solution yet. I'm not a coder, else I would have tried myself. I can't believe there's so little interest though for internal searchs stats.

This is something we might look at eventually. The way vBulletin does there search is a little inconvenient for these purposes. Right now our task list is overbooked; however, we may revisit this, because it would be interesting and valuable information to have at our disposal.

Mint is able to track internal searches using the search.php script.
unfortunately, vB directs the search.php?q=abc into search.php?searchid=123

It's rudamentary at best... it gives you the searchid.

but, if you want, you can see those searches (as long as vb hasn't expired them) to see what people are looking for.

In the end, I think you'll find that there's a couple gimmes of what people search for (main theme of your site) and the rest are 2-3 repeats of not so common phrases.

Briansol, we use Mint already, but it's way too limited and focusses only on realtime/recent stats since you can't specify date ranges or do any serious analyzing of the gathered stats. Plus, it's made for one user only to view it, since it shares all settings & prefs with anyone you give access to your stats.

Google comes with many more interesting insite search specific features, such as:

• Search categories
• Visits with Search
• Total Unique Searches
• Results Pageviews
• Search Exits
• Search Refinements
• Time after Search
• Search Depth
• Trending

and much more. So it's not just about what keywords people are entering, it's how they use the search function.


I'm aware that vBulletin transforms the search result page into search.php?searchid=10646, that's why there's still a different solution possible.

Notice that on the search result page, the keywords are being summed up.

All we need to figure out is how to pass those keywords into Google's Tracking Code on that page, like this: pageTracker._trackPageview('/search?q={exp:search:keywords}');

Please try to modify functions_vbseo.php file (make sure that you are implemented the new analytics code asa per New Google Analytics Code ):

PHP Code:

if(VBSEO_ADD_ANALYTICS_CODE)
{ 


add below:

PHP Code:

            global $display;
            $track_url = '';
            if(THIS_SCRIPT == 'search' && $_REQUEST['do'] == 'showresults' && $display['highlight'])
                $track_url = 'search.php?q='.urlencode(implode(' ',$display['highlight'])); 


find:

PHP Code:

pageTracker._trackPageview(); 


replace with:

PHP Code:

pageTracker._trackPageview('.($track_url?"'$track_url'":"").'); 


Many thanks Oleg, this is exactly what I was looking for. It seems to work at first sight, when looking at the source code of our search result pages. I'll have to wait another day though to see the results showing up in our Google Analytics account.

I did add an extra forums category into the code since we use the site search already on other parts of the site as well.

PHP Code:

            global $display;
            $track_url = '';
            if(THIS_SCRIPT == 'search' && $_REQUEST['do'] == 'showresults' && $display['highlight'])
                $track_url = 'search.php?cat=forums&q='.urlencode(implode(' ',$display['highlight'])); 


I would strongly suggest to implement this feature into the next release of vBSEO!

Yes, this is included in our interim vBSEO build and running @ vbseo.com now, we'll see how it goes when analytics reports are updated.

i included this code at my place too ... will tell you tomorow if it works ... what did you put in Query Parameter (required): search.php, search.php?searchid or something else?

We use for the query parameter:
q,keyword

And for the Category parameter:
cat


keyword & cat are used on a different non forum part at our website.

The first results showed up in our stats... It's all looking very good!

Looks great in our reports too!

my results are empty ... what i must include in this Query Parameter (required): isnt this for search.php? ... or did i missunderstand that?

You should just apply modification as described above, then enable Site search in analytics profile, enter "q" as query parameter and give it some time (a day or so) until reports are updated.