Cook up a tasty search dashboard in minutes
A simple recipe for monitoring your site’s search experiences.
Chef’s Notes:
Dashboards are a staple cuisine of the tech world. They are excellent at breaking down large chunks of data into palatable servings, and are universally leveraged by top organizations to:
- Obtain valuable business metrics.
- Measure the effectiveness of product iterations.
- Provide a window into potential problem areas & enhancement opportunities.
The bottom line is — if you’re not using dashboards to track your business health, you are letting valuable data slip through the cracks, and leaving money on the table for your competitors.
Collecting search performance data has always been a painful undertaking. Engineering teams often need to maintain parallel logging in multiple code bases to track the user query, the back-end response, the displayed results, and the result clicked (if any). And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Once the events are logged, intelligent stream-based processing is needed to convert individual events into meaningful real-time insights.
The technique we cover today bypasses all of this completely by leveraging SeaUrchin.IO’s client-side search events capture, cloud-based processing, and visualization dashboard.
Let’s get started.
Ingredients:
For this recipe, you will need:
- 1 website
- 1 or more existing search flows you’d like to track
- 1 free account @ SeaUrchin.IO
These ingredients will make one search dashboard, covering all search flows on your site. Serves all of your visitors.
Step 1:
Create an account at SeaUrchin.IO to obtain a unique tracking code.
Step 2:
Add the code to your site, and push it out (Google Tag Manager works great for this).
Step 3:
Using your app dashboard, define the search flows you want to track on your site. You can change these configurations at any time from the dashboard to add new search flows or fix existing ones.
Finish:
As users interact with your search experience, you will see live summaries of your site’s search activity, top queries, click index, response time, and a bevy of other metrics.
Enjoy!
