Today's article is very short and I hope quite useful for those eCommerce sites that do not have this implemented. Plus, it is very easy to configure.
To put things in context, if you analyze weekly or monthly the search terms users enter on your site, you are likely to see things like this:
Apart from the misspellings, which are very hard to standardize (in fact, it could even be debated whether we should do it), the same word in uppercase or lowercase is treated by Google Analytics as two different search terms, which forces you to resort to filters or Excel to carry out a proper analysis that combines these identical terms.
If we think about it for a moment, I really cannot think of any case where it is worth analyzing the performance of search terms like "Johnnie Walker“, “Johnnie walker" and "johnnie walker". But Google Analytics, with the default search-term configuration, does separate them.
So, what can we do to merge them in Analytics and avoid having to do it in Excel or something similar?
Very simple: configure a new filter like this:
Filter configuration in Analytics
- We add a new filter
- We give it a descriptive name
- Custom type
- We select "Lowercase" (or "Uppercase" if you prefer to see it that way in the reports)
- We apply it to the views we are interested in
Done. From this moment on, all searches on our site will be saved with the standard we have chosen and it will make analyzing search terms in our Universal Analytics easier.
Easy and quick. As you can see, I was not lying at the beginning, was I?
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