How to use your website's Site Search data to fuel smarter marketing decisions
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Site search data is one of the most underused assets in digital marketing.
Every time a visitor types something into your website's search bar, they're telling you exactly what they want - in their own words. It's maybe suggesting that they can't find it through your site's navigation, or that you don't have a suitable page that could have appeared in traditional search or AI/LLM search.
That's unfiltered customer intent, and most brands are either not collecting it properly or not doing anything with it.
This guide covers how to check whether your site search is set up, how to fix it if it isn't, what can corrupt the data, and - most importantly - how to put it to work across your marketing channels.
What is Site Search data and why does it matter?
Site search data captures the queries visitors type into your on-site search function. Unlike broader keyword research, this data comes from people who are already on your website and actively looking for something specific. Something they want to buy or talk to you about.
That distinction is significant. These aren't cold prospects browsing a SERP - these are warm, engaged users with a defined need. When someone searches "mens nike running trainers black" on your site, that's a product brief handed to you for free.
For digital marketers and CMOs, this data can inform product development, content strategy, digital PR, merchandising, email campaigns, and more. But only if it's actually being tracked.
How to check if site search is set up - and how to set it up if it's not
The three main analytics packages, GA4 (Google Analytics 4), Adobe Analytics & Matomo don't automatically capture site search data out of the box. It depends on how your site is built and whether the right configuration is in place.
GA4 sits in between the other two: it's a built-in feature like Matomo's, but the toggle lives inside a settings area that's easy to overlook.
Go to Admin (bottom-left gear icon) in GA4.
Under the Property column, click Data Streams, then select your web stream.
Click into Enhanced Measurement and click the gear icon next to it to open the detailed settings.
Check whether Site Search is toggled on. If it is, click through to see the list of query parameters GA4 is watching for (q, s, search, query, keyword by default) - confirm your site's actual search parameter is on that list, since GA4 won't track anything outside it.
To confirm it's actually firing, open DebugView (under Admin > DebugView), perform a real search on your site, and look for a view_search_results event appearing in real time. Click into it to check the search_term parameter is populating with the right value.
You can also check Reports > Realtime and look for view_search_results in the event count list as a quicker, non-debug-mode sanity check.
If Enhanced Measurement is off, or the parameter list doesn't match how your search URLs are actually structured, that's your answer: site search isn't currently being tracked, or it's tracking nothing because it's watching for the wrong parameter.
If you work out that Enhanced Measurement doesn't cover your setup, use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to fire a custom event. Create a trigger that fires on page views matching your search results URL pattern, then use a variable to extract the query string value. Send this as a custom event with the parameter search_term. This gives you more control and is the recommended approach for complex or headless setups.
This one's quick, because Matomo treats site search as a built-in feature with its own settings panel.
Log in to Matomo and go to Administration > Websites > Manage.
Click the pencil icon next to the site you want to check, to edit its settings.
Scroll down to the Site Search section.
Check the dropdown: if it reads "Site Search tracking enabled," it's live. If it reads "Do not track Site Search," it's switched off.
If it's enabled, check whether "Use default Site Search parameters" is ticked, and whether any custom query parameters are listed. This tells you which URL parameters Matomo is watching for - useful context if you're chasing down why certain searches aren't appearing, or why links are showing up as searches.
You can sense check this further by going to Behaviour > Site Search in the main reporting menu. If real search terms are populating there, tracking is working; if the report is empty or missing entirely, it isn't.
This one takes a bit more digging, because Adobe has no dedicated "site search" feature or settings toggle - it's something every implementation has to build manually using eVars and success events. There's nothing to switch on or off centrally, so checking "is it set up" really means checking "did someone build it, and is it populating."
The fastest way to check:
Open Analysis Workspace and create a blank project.
Open the dimension picker (left-hand panel) and search for anything that sounds like "Search Term," "Internal Search," or "Site Search." Naming conventions vary by implementation, so also check for a generically named eVar your team may have repurposed for this.
Drag that dimension into a freeform table. If it returns real search terms, tracking is live. If it returns blank or "unspecified," either it isn't set up, or it exists but isn't currently firing correctly.
It's worth doing the same check for a paired metric, a success event named something like "Internal Searches" or "Site Searches." If the dimension is empty but the metric is firing, that's usually a sign of a partial or broken implementation rather than a total absence of tracking.
If neither turns anything up, the safest assumption is that internal search isn't currently tracked at all, and it'll need to be built from scratch using the eVar and success event approach outlined further down.
Clean data leads to good decisions. Dirty data leads to bad ones. There are a few common ways site search data gets corrupted.
Internal Links Pointing to Search Pages
This is the most common issue. If internal links on your site, or within emails you send point directly to a search results URL - for example, a "Browse all results for trainers" link that goes to /search?q=trainers - GA4 will record that as a search query even though no user typed it. Over time, this inflates certain terms and skews your data.
If your site search report shows a sudden spike in "searches" for terms that map suspiciously well to your top navigation links, or links you send our in email marketing you're not imagining it. The top analytics platforms - GA4, Adobe Analytics, and Matomo - all share a quiet flaw in how they track internal search, and it's almost certainly inflating your numbers.
This matters more than it sounds. Site search data is one of the purest signals you have of customer intent, it tells you what people actually want, in their own words when no SEO strategy or ad copy is shaping the question. If that data is contaminated, every decision built on it (content gaps, navigation fixes, product roadmap input) is built on sand.
Here's what's going wrong, and what to do about it.
The problem: none of these tools can tell a search from a click
GA4, Adobe Analytics, and Matomo all default to the same shortcut for detecting internal search: they look for the presence of a query parameter like ?q= or ?search= in the page URL, and treat that as proof someone searched.
That's the entire logic in each case. None of them check how the visitor arrived at that URL.
This means if you have an internal link anywhere on your site that happens to point to a search results page, say a "Shop running shoes" link that lands on /search?q=running+shoes the platform logs that as a genuine search for "running shoes." Nobody typed anything. They clicked a button. But the report can't tell the difference.
Multiply that across every internal link built this way, and your "top search terms" report starts to look less like customer intent and more like a list of your own navigation links. Here's how the fix differs depending on which platform you're running.
GA4's Enhanced Measurement feature automatically tracks internal site search through an event called view_search_results, triggered purely by query parameter presence.
It's reasonable to assume there's a toggle for this somewhere in GA4's admin panel. There isn't. The only configuration option available is which query parameters to watch for (q, s, search, and so on) — there's no setting that asks GA4 to verify the search was user-initiated rather than link-driven. That means the fix has to happen one level down, in Google Tag Manager (GTM), where you control exactly what counts as a "real" search.
The proper fix: stop relying on GA4's automatic URL-based detection and build a GTM trigger that only fires the search event off genuine search actions — a form submission on the search box, a click on the search button, or a keyup event (Enter key) inside the search input field. Rather than firing because a page loaded with a certain URL pattern, the event now fires because someone actually used the search feature. This is a one-off implementation task for whoever manages your tag manager, but it solves the problem permanently at the source.
Two lighter options, if a GTM rebuild isn't happening this sprint:
Give your internal links a different parameter. If your search box submits to ?q=term, route your internal links through a different parameter name (e.g. ?ref_topic=term) or a server-side redirect that never exposes a trackable query string. GA4 only fires view_search_results when one of its configured search parameters appears in the URL, so links that avoid that parameter won't register as searches.
Filter the noise out in reporting. Build a GA4 Explore report (or a BigQuery query, if you're working with raw export data) that excludes view_search_results events where the referring page is one of your own internal link sources. This is a reporting-layer patch, not a real fix — anything downstream, like a Looker Studio dashboard, will still be working off contaminated data — but it gives your team a clean view for ad hoc reporting.
As Adobe has no built-in site search feature at all, this is actually a point in its favour here: because every implementation is custom-built (typically via eVars, success events, and Adobe Launch rules), the false-positive problem usually comes down to how the original tracking rule was written, and it's straightforward to correct.
If your current Launch rule fires whenever a page loads with a matching URL pattern (e.g. /search?term=*), it has exactly the same blind spot as GA4's auto-detection, any internal link landing on that URL pattern looks identical to a genuine search.
The proper fix: change the rule's trigger condition from "page load matching URL pattern" to one tied to an actual user action - a click on the search button or a form submit event on the search box. This typically means your developer or analytics implementer updates the existing Launch rule to fire on interaction rather than on page load, so the search eVar and success event only populate when someone has genuinely used the search field. Because Adobe's implementation is fully custom anyway, this is usually a contained change rather than a rebuild.
Matomo's default method is reading the search keyword straight out of the URL, and this has the same weakness as GA4, but Matomo gives you a cleaner built in alternative for fixing it without writing a custom trigger from scratch.
The proper fix: switch from automatic URL parameter detection to Matomo's manual trackSiteSearch() JavaScript function. Instead of every page load with a matching parameter being treated as a search, you call trackSiteSearch() explicitly on form submit or button click, so a search only logs when someone genuinely interacts with the search box. This requires a small JavaScript change on your search results page, but no changes to your existing links.
Two lighter options, if a code change can't happen:
Tag your internal links and suppress tracking for them. Add a distinguishing marker to those links (e.g. &src=internal) and use a short JavaScript check to skip Matomo's auto-detection when that marker is present, or filter those sessions out using a segment in reporting.
Narrow the tracked parameter. If your search box and your internal links technically use different parameter names but land on the same results page, go to your website's Site Search settings in Matomo and remove the parameter your links use from the tracked list, leaving only the one your search box actually submits to.
Once your data is clean and reliable, this is where it gets interesting.
Using site search data for Digital PR and Content Campaigns
Site search data reveals editorial gaps and trending topics directly from your audience. If hundreds of users are searching for something you don't have a page for, that's a content opportunity and potentially a digital PR campaign. We use this kind of demand intelligence to pitch reactive and proactive campaigns that already have a proven audience. Our Early Risers tool constantly analyses site search peaks and automatically alerts the team, so they can react fast and earn coverage & links for clients around potentially trending products and moments. We famously used Early Risers to gather data which powered our most successful PR campaign - generating over 700 placements for Sole Supplier by showcasing the huge increase in demand for white Vans trainers following the hit Netflix show Squid Game.
How site search data can influence online merchandising
Retail and e-commerce teams can use high volume search terms to inform product placement, filter logic, and category naming. If users are searching for a term that maps to a category you have but aren't surfacing clearly, that's a navigation problem worth fixing, and fixing it directly lifts conversion. If you don't have a category that fits rising searches, build one and test how that performs.
Email Marketing and CRM using your site search data
If you can, segment users who searched for specific terms and tailor follow-up email sequences accordingly. Someone who searched "gift ideas under £50" is in a different mindset to someone searching "returns policy" - treat them differently. Also, for wider email campaigns, featuring products we now know people are searching for in larger numbers and labelling these as trending or rising can help drive increased sales.
High-frequency search terms make strong ad copy and social content hooks because they mirror the language your audience already uses. Pull the top 20 terms each month and use them to brief creative teams. Consider building social content on your recently trending site terms - ensure you have solid paid or organic ranking coverage if people jump from social platforms back to Google.
Start with the data you already have
Site search data isn't a new channel, it's a lens on intent you're probably already generating but not reading. Getting GA4, Adobe Analytics or Matomo set up correctly probably takes less than an hour.
Using that data strategically can shape your content, product, and campaign roadmap for the quarter and beyond.
Check whether it's working today. The queries are already there waiting.
