Yesterday a client asked me what Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they should be tracking on their public site search. At first I was afraid I would not be able to answer this question – I don’t know their business or website nearly as well as they do. I know the wide variety of statistics that are possible to capture, but what should I recommend to this particular client?

I thought for a moment and realized they needed to know their goals for search before diving headfirst into any analysis. There is no point capturing and analyzing search statistics unless you need them. They should have a clear reason or objective behind each KPI they track. Second, they needed to think in terms of deltas or comparisons instead of raw numbers or simple orders of magnitude.  Statistics like quantity of searches or frequency of keywords are unlikely to reveal anything by themselves, but observing something increasing or decreasing over time can tell a very interesting story.  Likewise, comparing any certain statistic between users that ran a search vs. users that did not run a search can be very revealing.