Through the GA4 site search tracking (also known as ‘Internal Site Search Tracking’) feature, you can determine the search terms used by your website visitors to find information on your website:
Once you have implemented site search tracking in your GA4 property, you can see the list of keywords (called ‘Search terms’) used by your website visitors to find information on your website:
The ‘view_search_results’ event
Once you have enabled/setup site search tracking in your GA4 property, whenever a user inputs a query and clicks on the search button on your website, GA4 fires the ‘view_search_results’ event.
You can see the ‘view_search_results’ event in your GA4 property via the ‘Events’ report:
You should check how the ‘view_search_results’ events are being recorded in the GA4 BigQuery data table and what event parameters are being passed along with this event type.
Take a close look at the various event parameters which are sent along with the ‘view_search_results’ events:
- search_term
- ignore_referrer
- engagement_time_msec
- session_engaged
- ga_session_id
- page_referrer
- engaged_session_event
- unique_search_term
- content_group
- page_location
- batch_ordering_id
- batch_page_id
- ga_session_number
- page_title
While creating a text prompt, we will refer to these event parameters (esp., ‘search_term’).
Creating Site Search Tracking report in GA4 BigQuery.
Here is how you can create an ‘Internal Site Search’ report in GA4 BigQuery to track what users are searching on your website.