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I use Google Analytics to track the searches users do on my website. I have no query parameter for searches (nothing like q=mykeyword). Therefore I use Google Tag Manager to send a "fake" value for the field page to Google Analytics with the following snippet:

function() {
  var regex = /^(\/[a-z]{0,2}\/live\/search)\/(.*)/;
  if(regex.test({{Page Path}})) {
    var res = regex.exec({{Page Path}});
    return res[1]+"?gaSearchLive=" + res[2];
  }
  return;
}

A typical URI used for searches is /de/live/search/mykeyword?searchID=1234 or /en/archive/search/mykeyword2?searchID=4567.

My website differentiates between live and archive searches. Is there a way to separate those two kinds of search in a way that I can analyze them separately in Google Analytics?

How can I prevent query parameters from polluting my analysis? In section Behavior => Site Search => Pages I see the following:

pages with query parameters

Is there a way to remove parameters like "searchID" / "page" etc. from the url? How do I need to modify my Google Tag Manager tag? Is it possible to overwrite the url sent to Google Analytics as I do already for the page field?

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I would use separate views for each. One that includes pages that start /de/live/search and one for /de/archive/search.

Then you could exclude the query parameters from your main reporting view in the view settings.

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  • Thank you for your answer, I excluded the parameters via view settings. Regarding separate views for live / archive searches: I find it very confusing, because I need to switch the views often. Is there no solution, creating different reports one for live / archive and add them to the Site Search menu? Or maybe via custom dashboard? I tried already but dashboards cannot display tables with more than one dimension... So I need to view every custom report itself instead of having a overview of all relevant searches...
    – koseduhemak
    Apr 10, 2018 at 14:41

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