Clickport
Start free trial
Intuitive Dashboard Real-Time Analytics Session Tracking Engagement Tracking Goal Conversions Filtering & Segments Conversion Funnels User Flows Privacy First Bot Protection
For agencies For SaaS For e-commerce For affiliates For bloggers For publishers Google Search Console Bing Webmaster Tools WordPress Shopify Tracker install SPA tracking Custom Events API reference vs Google Analytics vs Matomo vs Cloudflare
How It Works Blog Updates Documentation UTM Builder GDPR Checker GA4 Data Loss Estimator GA Legal Status About Contact Status Security

Site search terms

If your website has a search box, Clickport shows you what visitors type into it. There is nothing to configure. As long as your search results page puts the query in the URL, the terms appear in your dashboard automatically.

Site search is one of the most honest feedback channels you have. Visitors tell you, in their own words, what they came for and what they could not find by browsing.

How it works

Most search implementations put the query in the URL of the results page, for example /?s=pricing on WordPress or /search?q=pricing on many other platforms. Clickport recognizes these four query parameters, case-insensitive:

?q= ?s= ?search= ?query=

When a pageview URL contains one of them, the value is treated as a search term. This covers WordPress (?s=), Shopify (?q=), and most common site-search setups out of the box.

Privacy by default. Clickport strips all other query parameters from stored URLs at ingestion. Only these four search parameters survive URL cleanup, alongside campaign parameters which are extracted into their own fields. See UTM Tracking for how campaign data is handled.

Where search terms appear

Open the Pages panel and switch to the Search sub-tab. Each row shows one search term with the number of unique visitors who searched for it and the total number of result-page views.

PagesSessionsGoalsJourneys
TopEntryExitSearch404
Search Term
Visitors
Views
pricing
412
538
api documentation
297
361
cookie consent
244
290
export csv
188
215
gdpr
156
179
wordpress plugin
143
168
self hosting
121
140
google analytics import
109
127
funnel report
88
97
custom events
76
89
tracking script
69
78
refund policy
54
61
data retention
47
53
team access
38
44
uptime
29
33
single sign on
21
24

Click any column header to sort by term, visitors, or views. In the realtime view the Visitors column switches to Current, showing who is searching right now.

How to act on search data

  • Spot content gaps. Terms with high volume and no good landing page are content requests. If "student discount" keeps showing up and you have no such page, your visitors just wrote your next FAQ entry.
  • Fix navigation. If visitors search for something that already exists ("pricing", "contact"), they could not find it by browsing. That is a menu or layout problem, not a content problem.
  • Learn your customers' vocabulary. Visitors search in their own words. If they type "cost" and your navigation says "Plans", the search panel is telling you which word to use.
  • Catch churn signals. Terms like "cancel subscription" or "refund" deserve a prominent, well-designed page, not a support ticket.

Filtering

Clicking a search term row applies a page filter for that exact results URL, so every panel, the chart, and the Sessions list narrow down to visitors who searched for that term. All regular filters compose with the Search list too: filter by country, source, or goal completion first, and the panel shows only the search terms of that segment.

What is not captured

  • Search pages without the query in the URL. If your results page lives at a clean path like /search-results with no recognized parameter, no term can be read from the URL.
  • Other parameter names. Parameters such as ?keyword= or ?term= are not recognized and are stripped at ingestion like every other query parameter. If your platform uses a custom parameter and you cannot change it, tell us which one.
  • POST-based search. Searches submitted without a URL change leave nothing in the URL to read. Clickport deliberately never inspects what visitors type into form fields, including search boxes. See Forms for what form tracking does and does not capture.

Good to know

  • Search result pageviews are regular pageviews. They count toward your plan like any other page.
  • Terms are shown exactly as typed, so "Pricing" and "pricing" appear as separate rows.
  • The Search list is a dashboard view and is not part of the CSV export ZIP. The underlying pageviews (with their search URLs) are included in the pages dataset.
  • Search terms work on single-page apps too: the tracker records URL changes on client-side navigation. See SPA Tracking.

Related

Previous 404 Tracking