Want to know what people searched for right before they landed on your site? The Top 20 Search Terms table in the Website Visitors report (go to Reports > Website Visitors) shows exactly that - though, as you'll see below, it can only see part of the picture.
Why this matters: Search term data only shows what it can see, and today that's almost entirely Bing-powered searches, since Google doesn't expose query terms to any tracker. Knowing that gap upfront keeps you from misreading the report: a term's absence doesn't mean nobody searched for it, it may just mean Google didn't share the data.
What we do track under Top 20 Search Terms
- Referring URLs containing query parameters
- Example: https://www.bing.com/search?q=act-on
Today, this is primarily from searches powered by Bing. This includes searches originating from Bing properties as well as from syndicated sites (Yahoo, AOL, etc.).
What we don't track under Top 20 Search Terms
- Referrals from Google organic search or other Google search-powered properties.
- Google does not expose query parameters to our beacon tracker.
- Search terms included in the "utm_term" parameter of a URL.
Search Term Comparison
Search Terms are provided for the past 3 months. In the right two columns, there is an indication of whether a term moved up or down in rank, or if it is a new * search term compared to the last months.