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How do I track internal site searches on my website?

Zenovay automatically captures searches from common URL parameters, or you can report SPA searches manually with one tracker call. Here's how.

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Site Search is what visitors type into the search box on your own site. Zenovay surfaces these queries under your website → Analytics → Site Search — a sortable table showing each query, its share of all searches, and how many returned no results, with a No-results only filter and a page-URL filter. It is free on every plan.

Automatic (no code)

If your search results page uses a URL parameter for the query, Zenovay captures it automatically as soon as the tracker is installed — no extra code.

Supported parameters, in precedence order (the first non-empty one wins):

  1. ?q=
  2. ?query=
  3. ?search=
  4. ?s= (the WordPress default)

The captured term is capped at 256 characters. Example URL:

https://example.com/search?q=annual+report

That visit is recorded with the search term annual report.

Manual (JS / SPA search)

If your search box filters results in place without changing the URL, report the search yourself when it is submitted:

window.zenovay('track', 'search', { query: 'user query', results_count: 12 });

Call this when the search is committed (the user presses Enter or clicks the search button) — not on every keystroke. Fire it once per committed search.

  • query — the text the visitor searched for.
  • results_count — the number of results returned. Use 0 when nothing matched. This powers the zero-result insight, which highlights searches that found nothing so you can spot content gaps.

Where to see it

Open your website → Analytics → Site Search. The table shows the top queries for the selected period with sortable columns:

  • Searches — how many times the term was searched.
  • % of searches — that term's share of all searches.
  • No-results — how many of those searches returned nothing.

Use the No-results only filter to focus on content gaps, and the page-URL filter to scope the table to searches made on a specific page. The Find query box searches your full search history for the selected period server-side — not just the rows shown — so a rarely-used query that falls outside the top of the table by volume is still found when you type it.

A note on privacy

Search terms are what your visitors typed, so they can occasionally contain personal information (an email address, a name). For that reason the Site Search table is owner-only: it is excluded from public shared dashboards. Keep this in mind if you share search data outside your team.

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