Using Google Analytics to Track Your Website’s Search Bar Interactions

We live in a dynamic digital world where so many variables influence the customer decision making process. Some variables are harder to track than others, but we’ve recently added a simple event tracking feature in Google Analytics that tells us exactly what our client’s customers are looking for when visiting their websites.

We’re currently tracking customer searches for hotel booking engines and real estate property searches, but this can be applied to almost any type of website search bar.

Hotels benefit in knowing the dates, room types, room search availability results, and packages their visitors are most interested in. Revenue and marketing managers are then able to compare this data with their pacing reports and identify areas to maximize room rates or implement targeted marketing initiatives to increase revenue for a certain time period. It also provides hoteliers with primary data they can use to move the more popular content in more prevalent areas to increase impressions.

Our real estate clients use the data to understand which areas, neighborhoods and individual homes are most sought after – in addition to finding the average price range, square footage, and total number of beds & baths their clients are mainly interested in. This information can then be shared with their agents and also used to update their websites and digital marketing initiatives as well.

We’re continuously inventing new ways to update & improve our client’s website and digital strategies based on their customer’s direct interactions, and developing primary research using Google Analytics event tracking is one of the many ways we help clients gain valuable insights into their customer base.