CODEWITHSUNDEEP
google-analytics
Eduardo Pérez
Eduardo Pérez

Reputation: 23

Google Analytics not detecting 1 of 2 search terms

For some reason, Analytics is not detecting one of my two search terms in my URL.

I have a system where you search for a phone and a company to verify compatibility so the URL is: result.php?phone=name+of+phone&company=name+of+company

When going through Analytics reports, the only search term available is the company name, not the phone. I want to see statistics for each phone and company combination that has been done. Is this possible? How?

I already set the search terms (phone and company) in view configuration.

Thanks!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 47

Answers (1)

Eike Pierstorff
Eike Pierstorff

Reputation: 32770

You probably have been tricked by the bit of documentation that says that you can set up to five parameters for search. Well you can, but you can only use one at a time, i.e. you can have multiple search pages that use different parameters, but if you use multiple parameters on the same page the last one will simply overwrite the previous ones (same with search category). This is alas expected behavior, even if the documentation seems to suggest otherwise.

If you need multiple parameters the best way would be to create a hit scoped custom dimension and send it along with the search queries. Then you can do a custom report where you set the search term as dimension and your custom dimension as subordinate dimension to do a breakdown. How to create custom dimension has already been discussed to death on SO, so I won't explain it unless you meet a specific problem when setting it up.

There are other possible workarounds that work without custom dimensions (you could use an advanced filter to remove the "phone" parameter from the query string and add it to the page path, creating a distinct virtual url for each phone, and then do a breakdown by search term), but custom dimensions seem the easiest and best solution.

Upvotes: 1

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