What does Internal Search track?

This article explains Internal Search in the Siteimprove Analytics and Usability modules and covers definitions of visits, searches, and search exits.

Internal Search displays a list of search terms that your visitors have entered into your search solution on your website. Internal Search does not show search terms that were used to find your website from an external search engine like Google or Bing.

Internal Search Graph

The graph at the top to Internal search results page shows three mertics: Visits, Searches, and Search Exits. 

• Visits -Visits refers to all users that have used the internal search during their sessions in the selected period.
• Searches - The number of searches is the total number of times a search was executed in the selected period. The number can be higher than your visits as a user may do multiple searches during their time on your site.
• Search exits - Visits ending after a search was performed. This means that users did not click on any search results.

For example, The image below shows that for the selected period (September 2017) 58 visits were made to the search solution on the website, with users making 86 searches. Out of those 86 searches, 5 visits ended after a search was performed.

Internal Search table

The table below the internal search graph gives more details on searches carried out.

• Visits show the number of visitors who searched,
  • "% of total" for visits refers to the % of visits that performed a search for that term,
• Searches can be expanded to list the Pages (URLs) on which searches occurred. This can be considered as the referrer if the search result list is presented on a different URL,
• Actions of the visitor
  • Search exits - Visit ended after the search was performed,
  • Visits continued in another tab or window - Visit continued on a page on your site in a new tab or window after a search was performed. 
  • Search results - This shows the result that the visitor clicked on after the search was performed. 

For example:

To track visitors' actions in regards to the internal search term planning, we can see that 28 (or 12.2% of all actions made) actions were made with visits continuing in another tab or window. 40 actions were made by clicking on the Council page in the search results. 16 actions were logged as Search exits, meaning that users did not click on any search result and ended their visit immediately after searching for planning.