MetaLocator allows you to track searches, clicks and other interactions on a per location and per Interface basis. This guide explores the various methods for reporting usage in MetaLocator. MetaLocator allows for tracking using our internal analytics, which is enabled by default, Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager. To enable tracking for Google Analytics, check out this tutorial. To view the internal analytics, click Analytics > Analytics in the MetaLocator dashboard.
For a complete list of all analytics tracked, see Piwik's documentation.
Segmenting by Interface
Our internal analytics, Google Analytics and most third-party analytics packages allow for the creation of segments. Segments filter the entire analytics database by a particular variable in order to provide a specific view on your data. A common segment is to filter activity based on a given Interface. The approach can vary by Interface configuration, but a reliable method is to create a segment based on the Interface's ID number. Every request, except the Location Landing Pages, includes this Itemid parameter which uniquely identifies the Interface. The Itemid can be found next to the Interface name, as shown here:
Once you have the Itemid, a segment can be built in the Internal analytics:
The same type of segment can be built in Google Analytics. This segment shows the same filter by interface using the method above.
Counting Searches by Interface
The above segment gives us all page loads, searches and similar activity occurring in a given interface. However, we may want to identify search activity in the interface. Every time a user clicks "Submit" on the search form, MetaLocator includes the "&task=search_zip" in the URL. Leveraging this consistent behavior, we can count searches as shown in the segment below:
Consider that these are explicit search events where the user clicked search, however; a user can sometimes obtain results without clicking search. A common Interface setup is to "AutoFind" the user and display relevant results. In this scenario, the user may see the relevant results without searching. If the only actions are clicks to the Details page or OpenMarkerWindow events, that may indicate that the user found what they were looking for.
Other search options appear in the URL as documented in this post. This method can be used to build segments by Category, state, country and even custom fields.
Segmenting by Category
You can also build segments based on the category in the URL. When the user clicks "Search", the URL includes the categories selected as a parameter such as:
tags[]=10
This means the search included the selection of the category with ID = 10. You can obtain category IDs by looking in the ID column under Categories.