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Our website has two search forms. One of them includes no text input, but a lot of checkboxes, dropdown boxes and radio buttons for narrowing down our product catalogue.

Is there a good way to track how clients use that search function, similar to Google Analytics Site Search? I don't have any specific goals in mind, but would like to know how it is used.

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You could save the input values in a database, when the form has been submitted. Once you collected enough data you could analyse its usage. If the problem are the too many fixed value options, bitvectors are a popular way to go about it. But you could also store the value in full, or use different approaches. – milo5b Sep 10 '12 at 13:30
1  
Of course I could do it myself like that, but I was hoping that someone had already developed the software to do it. I wouldn't write a script to parse log files if I knew about Google Analytics, for instance. – Tim Sep 10 '12 at 13:57
I don't know any software that would do this out of the box - and since it's not very difficult to code it might be quicker than finding out if such software exists and in a positive case evaluating it against your needs (and possibly iterating this many times). BTW, I would still write a tool that collects stats for me, instead of relying solely on GA. (There are already programs that parse your log files too) – milo5b Sep 10 '12 at 14:34

1 Answer

up vote 1 down vote

I would suggest creating a track event call with GA:

<script type="text/javascript">
function gaTrackEvent(category, action, label)
{
     _gat._getTrackerByName()._trackEvent(category, action, label);
}
</script>

Then with each click of the check box send the track event:

<input type="checkbox" value="1" onclick="gaTrackEvent('search', '<some_filter_action>', '<keyword_used_or_some_other_information_related_to_the_filter>')"> <Some filter item>

Each time a user clicks the checkbox it will fire an event to GA that you can then analyze within the events section.

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