Question about Site Search tracking

Hello! I have set up Matomo (Standalone) for a new site I’m building. The tracking/reporting is working fine, so no general issues. For internal site searches, though, I have been struggling on getting quality site search-reporting, which is where I hopefully can get some help :slight_smile:

On my site, the search tool/filter I use allows for multiple combined query parameters during a search. For example:

example.com/search?topic=aaa&article_size=444&audience=ddd,eee&publish_year_range=1995-2005

When I add all the query parameter types (i.e. topic, article_size, …) to the Query Parameter or the Category Parameter list in the settings, it seems I only get reporting on the first query parameter found on the search URL. I.e. In the above example, I would get keyword or category reporting for ‘aaa’ but no reporting on the other parts of the search.

I could setup a JS call to push the ‘trackSiteSearch’ object, but that appears to only accept one keyword at a time also (example from Matomo site below).

So, my questions are:

  • Is there a way to record/track a search that includes multiple search parameters?
  • Is there any special meaning to Matomo’s ‘Search Category’ other than an additional hierarchy?
  • I assume if I push ‘trackSiteSearch’ multiple times for one search, there’s no way to indicate all the objects are related to a single search?

_paq.push([‘trackSiteSearch’,
// Search keyword searched for
“Banana”,
// Search category selected in your search engine. If you do not need this, set to false
“Organic Food”,
// Number of results on the Search results page. Zero indicates a ‘No Result Search Keyword’. Set to false if you don’t know
0
]);

Thank You!
Adam

Hi,

Maybe you can try to add some custom behaviour dimensions to store topic, size, publish year range
https://matomo.org/docs/custom-dimensions/

Or else custom variables, as audience can contain several values…
https://matomo.org/docs/custom-variables/

On the developer side:

https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-javascript-guide#custom-variables
https://developer.matomo.org/guides/tracking-javascript-guide#custom-dimensions