To integrate your search with Google Analytics, you need to enable the integration in the app and configure it in your Google Analytics dashboard.

Enabling Google Analytics integration in the app settings

Go to your AddSearch Dashboard and switch the toggle for Google Analytics integration:

Note that you need to do it for the Widget and Search results page views separately if you are using both.

Setting up the integration

Now you need to configure the integration in your Google Analytics. The steps to do this are as follows:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account
2. Click on Admin, located in the upper right-hand corner.
3. Click on View Settings
4. Under Site Search Settings, turn on the button marked Site search Tracking. Input addsearch as the Query parameter, and check the box Strip query parameters out of URL. Then, input addsearch-category as the Category parameter, and check the box Strip query parameters out of URL. Click Save.

See the screenshot for the correct settings:

Reporting

AddSearch reports three types of analytics information with a different Search category:

• Result clicked: One or multiple of the search results got clicked
• Results viewed: After typing a search query the results are viewed or scrolled through for a few seconds. This might or might not end up with a “Result clicked” event
• No results: Search query returned no results at all. Nothing got clicked

Additional Notes

AddSearch is an instant search, and users of the search typically type one or two letters before clicking on a search result. This means that the top keywords in your GA statistics are typically very short and somewhat hard to decipher. We’re working on a solution for this.

Google Tag Manager

If you are serving Google Analytics as a Google Tag Manager (GTM) tag, some additional steps are required for Google Analytics integration to work.

Sign in to your GTM account.

Select “Variables” from the left-hand side menu

Under “User-Defined Variables”, click “NEW”.

Create a variable “virtualPageURL”.

Click save. Click NEW again, and create another variable “virtualPageTitle”.

See that both variables are created:

Select “Triggers” from the left-hand side menu. Click NEW.

Create a custom event trigger on “VirtualPageview”.

Select Tags from the left-hand side menu, click NEW.

Edit your existing Universal Analytics tag, or create one if one doesn’t already exist. In the “Fields to set” section, add the two variables virtualPageURL and virtualPageTitle linked to the fields page and title. Add virtualPageview as a firing trigger.

Publish your changes, and the search events should start showing in your Google Analytics account.