'Top Searches' block is actually 'Top Keywords' and so returns unexpected results

Created on 8 September 2011, about 13 years ago
Updated 30 December 2023, 11 months ago

The 'Top Searches' block in the Google Analytics Summary was not returning any results for my site, even though the Google Analytics account showed results under 'Site search'.

I thought this was a bug until I looked hard at the query examples here: (http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/gdata/gdataCommonQueries.html) and compared to the full Google Analytics report on Google's site.

In the GA report, 'Top Site Searches' is found under , while 'Keywords' is under .

The 'Top Searches' block actually refers to the 'Keywords' query, while what I was expecting was the 'Top Site Searches' query. As far as I understand it, keywords are the search terms users plug into Google that lead them to my site, while top searches are what users search for while on my site. While the keywords could reasonably be termed the 'top search' terms from Google's point of view, when looking at a report on the Drupal site, 'top searches' implies the use of the internal site search.

I suggest changing to the Site Search query, and/or changing the name of the block to 'Keywords' or 'Top Site Search Terms' or something to reduce chances of confusion.

Keywords
This query returns visits broken down by search engine keywords used, sorted by visits in descending order.

dimensions=ga:keyword
metrics=ga:visits
sort=-ga:visits

Site Search - Search Terms
This query returns the number of visits broken down by internal site search, sorted by number of unique searches for a keyword in descending order.

dimensions=ga:searchKeyword
metrics=ga:searchUniques
sort=-ga:searchUniques
📌 Task
Status

Fixed

Version

1.0

Component

Code

Created by

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