Hi Friends,
I’ve been thinking that it might be helpful to learn what my site/forum visitors are searching for, when they use the forum search. The forum (SMF with Tiny Portal) software doesn’t provide any such functionality. But I was browsing through my Piwik installation, after upgrading to 2.3, and noticed the Actions plugin, which sounds like it might work.
The description says:
Before I go on, does “…track your internal website’s Search Engine” mean that I can learn what my visitors are searching for (when they use the forum search)? Or am I misunderstanding?
If that’s what it does mean, how do I set it up? It shows as Activated. But I haven’t found any widget. I’ve searched the User Guide and FAQs, but can’t find much info about plugins in general, at all, and nothing about specific plugins. Well, I found plenty of info about how to write new plugins, but I just don’t have those skills.
If that’s not what it means…is there any way to learn what members and visitors are searching for, when they use the forum search feature, using PIwik?
Ok, thanks matt. I found Settings > Websites > Site Search. It looks like I have Site Search enabled, but the UI looks a little different from the user guide info. And I don’t understand it. This is in version 2.3.0, since I just now saw that 2.4.0 is available.
Under “Tracking Internal Site Search” it has “Query parameter” and “Category parameter” fields. And it says this:
“Note: the Query parameters and Category parameters will be used only for websites which have Site Search enabled but left these parameters empty. To disable Site Search for new websites, leave these two fields empty.”
Which doesn’t make sense to me. The parameters will only be used if site search is enabled, and parameters are blank?? How can the parameters be used, if parameters are left blank??
First of all, I’m not entirely sure what Query Parameter and Category Parameter" mean. The User Guide sort of clears it up, by calling them URL Parameters. So I think that means the URL of the search results, and if so I’m pretty sure that my site uses “search”. But the search word itself isn’t in the URL. So maybe that explains why I’m not getting any results in Actions > Site Search.
This is an SMF forum, but I’m not sure if not having the search word in the URL is an SMF issue, or something related to my server. And on top of that, I’m not sure if my understanding of any of this is correct.
Can you (or anyone) help clear up any of this for me?
Well, I thought I figured out the problem, when I noticed the URL of a search result says “search2” instead of “search”. So I added “search2” to the Query Parameters. But I’m still not getting any resullts in Actions > Site Search.
Could someone please give me a clue what I’m missing?
What does this mean (the quote below)? If I could understand it, I could probably figure out what to do. But it just doesn’t make sense.
“Note: the Query parameters and Category parameters will be used only for websites which have Site Search enabled but left these parameters empty. To disable Site Search for new websites, leave these two fields empty.”
Paraphrased – the parameters will only be used for website which left the parameters empty.
How can parameters be used, if they aren’t listed? So I have to leave the parameters empty to make it work? But then the next sentence says to leave them empty to disable searching!
Now I think the problem is the search words not showing in the URL of the search. I contacted my host, and waiting for reply. Now I’m thinking it’s something to do with server config.
