Search Analytics for Your Site. Louis Rosenfeld

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      Getting Started with Pattern Analysis

      Good news: you already have the tools—your brain included—necessary for pattern analysis. I’ll wager that you already own a copy of Microsoft Excel; if not, you could certainly create a spreadsheet in a free tool like Google Documents or OpenOffice. To get started, you’ll need some minimal data: queries (at least from the short head) and how frequently they were searched on your site. You might grab these by exporting them from your analytics application or by using this PERL script

      Next, create two columns in your spreadsheet—one for your unique queries, the other for their frequency counts—and import or paste in your data. If you know the date range for your data sample, mention it in the spreadsheet so you won’t forget it later. Here’s an example of such a spreadsheet that contains common queries from Michigan State University’s Web site in Figure 3-1. We’ll return to the MSU example throughout this chapter.

      Figure 3-1. A week’s worth of Michigan State University queries, sorted by frequency.

      I’ve created a souped-up version of this spreadsheet (shown in Figure 3-2), which I encourage you to download and use as a template. (You can get it here:

      Figure 3-2. The same data as in Figure 3-1—now all gussied-up.