Using Alarmduck to Identify “Hot” Onsite Search Phrases
One of the most basic things that users do on websites is conduct onsite searches. While it is a best practice to capture the search phrases your users search on your site, there are so many of them, that most web analysts ignore the reports related to search phrases. In reality, the main thing you might want to know is whether any specific search phrases have a sudden increase or decrease.
This is a great use-case for Alarmduck, the data anomaly tool for Adobe Analytics. You can setup a report to look for internal search phrase data anomalies and then forget about it. If there are ever any major increases or decreases, you will be notified in Slack and can take action at that time. The following will show an example of how to do this.
Creating Search Phrase Alerts
To set this up in Alarmduck, you simply create a new report. You should already have your Slack Channels and Adobe Analytics ID configured (if not, read this to learn how). In this case, I am going to post anomalies to a general “demystified” slack channel, using my Adobe ID. I am having Alarmduck query the “Exclude Excel Posts” Virtual Report Suite that I have created (long story!) and I am going to apply a segment of the “Last 7 Days” to have Alarmduck focus on the most recent data. Finally, I am going to have Alarmduck look at the values in my “Internal Search Keywords” eVar and use the metric of “Internal Searches” to check for data anomalies:
That is it! If there are ever any major changes, I will see it in Slack. For example, recently, I announced that I will be doing my advanced Adobe Analytics “Top Gun” training class in Chicago. In this case, I received an Alarmduck alert indicating that there was a spike in the search phrase “Top Gun” on the Demystified website:
