“Search” relates to http://www.search.com

If a search engine is not detected in the list then it will show in the Referrer report. BTW, GA-Experts have some clever ways to enhance the search engine list and have posted one method at:
http://www.ga-experts.co.uk/blog/2006/10/updated-uk-international-search-engine-javascript-for-google-analytics/

Good luck

—
Updated: 24-Aug-2007

Looking at this again in the urchin.js, any referrer with ’search’ in the domain name will also be displayed as ’search’ in the reports – for example search.mysite.com. Clearly this is not intented. I have submited this to the developers for correction.

Thanks to my colleague Serge for pointing this out.

Brian

I was just looking at the reports that GA provides under the Search Engines tab. I’ve got the following values:

1. Google — 67,062 visits
2. Yahoo — 4,179 visits
3. Search — 3,269 visits
4. AOL — 2,825 visits

My question is if ‘Search’ refers to the search engine search.live.com, or maybe search.com or is just the value assigned when GA can’t find the referring search engine.

Your input on this one is very much appreciated

1. Yes, this KPI very sensitive to the market you are analysing. If you have any data on this I would love to see it – either in confidence or on the blog. I would agree, that a web site for completing a tax payment is much more likely to get the conversion on the first visit. It would be great to see how much more likely that is – and perhaps even benchmark against other sectors.

2. Yes, price comparison means a lot of the qualification criteria (price) has been taken into account before the visitor arrives on your site. So they would be much more likely to convert on their first visit. If the data says not, then it would indicate there are trust factor problems (no or unclear payment encryption, poor design, no testimonials, unknown brand, no returns policy, no privacy policy etc.), or technical problems (slow pages, broken links, site downtime etc.) with your web site.

Would love to see some data…

I tend to prefer indexes rather than comparing individual conversions, partly because my statistics knowledge is not as good as yours and partly because I have been mixing with a lot of marketing people lately!

Essentially marketers appear to perfer one number to convey the story rather than two. Having recently written an entire chapter on measuring KPIs using GA (my mind swimming in numbers, ratios and percentages), I tend to agree. Both methods convey the same message, so I guess its just personal choice.

Eric: Good to see we are on the same page here.

BTW, I chose %transactions as the numerator as I wanted to specifically emphasize that I was interested in purchasers (customers), not all goal conversions.