Improve Results with Analytics

Gathering user activity data can change the content and order of your results. The effect isn’t direct, like sorting or merchandising. It’s behind the scenes. By understanding and analyzing user behavior, you make considered adjustments to your relevance and ranking. Any such user analysis improves both your search solution and your business.

Analytics data informs decisions you make regarding:

• how you format and structure your data
• what configurations you make to your index and search
• how you calibrate these settings
• many front-end choices, like faceting, layout, and other UI/UX concerns
• whether and how to implement personalization, query suggestions, Rules, merchandising, and other such result-oriented features

This directly affects what the user sees after entering a search term. Capturing meaningful analytics data in an accessible format is critical to the success of your solution.

Two kinds of analytics: Search and Click

Algolia provides two different kinds of analytics: one that looks closely at your users’ search behavior (Search Analytics), and another that measures what they do after a search (Click and Conversion Analytics).

• Search Analytics facilitates modeling by breaking down user searches into numerous categories of data, like popular searches, number of “no results”, and filter usage. The goal of Search Analytics is to ensure that your search experience is data-driven.

• Click and Conversion Analytics take that data further, providing insight into what significant actions a user takes after performing a search: you can analyze click metrics as well as define conversion events to see which searches lead most often to those events.