Search Terms

Search Terms lists what visitors searched for on your store, with the sessions, sales and results for each term. It shows what customers want and what they can’t find.

The Search Terms report, with five summary cards and a table with one row per search term.

How It’s Calculated

Each row is one search term, with the most sessions first. A session that searched for the same term twice counts once for that term. The columns are:

  • Search Term: the text the visitor searched for, as typed. Shoes and shoes are 2 rows. A search with no text shows as (unknown).
  • Sessions: sessions that searched for the term.
  • Visitors: the number of different browsers.
  • Conversions: the number of those sessions that ended in a purchase.
  • Conversion Rate: Conversions divided by Sessions.
  • Revenue: the value of those purchases. It is the total of the Shopify order each purchase links to: items minus discounts, plus shipping, plus tax that isn’t already in the prices, minus refunds. Where das Pixel couldn’t match an order, it uses the value it saw at checkout.
  • Avg Results: the average number of product variants the search returned.
  • Zero-Result Rate: the share of those sessions where the search returned no results.
  • Order Linked: the share of conversions that matched a Shopify order.

The revenue belongs to the whole session, not only to what the visitor bought after searching.

Avg Results and Zero-Result Rate depend on your theme reporting how many product variants each search returned. When it doesn’t, both are blank for that term. Blank means unmeasured, not empty.

Select a row to open Sessions Explorer with that search term and date range.

Summary Cards

The cards above the table are Search Terms, Sessions, Zero-Result Rate, Revenue and Order Match Rate.

  • Search Terms counts the named terms and leaves out (unknown).
  • Sessions and Revenue add up the rows. A session that searched for 2 terms is in 2 rows, so the cards count its sessions and its revenue twice.
  • Zero-Result Rate averages the rows, weighted by the sessions that had a result count.
  • Order Match Rate is the match rate across all rows, weighted by conversions.

With Compare on, the first four cards show their change.

What Counts

  • Visitors who declined analytics cookies, or who opted out of the sale or sharing of their data while Require Sale-of-Data Consent is on, aren’t recorded. Known bots are left out.
  • Only events inside the date range count, in your store’s time zone.
  • Turn on Live to refresh the report every 30 seconds. Without it, a figure can be up to 10 minutes old.

A warning shows above the report when das Pixel saw less than 70% of your online-store orders in the last 30 days. This report has no Segment, Sales Channel or Filters control. Pinned to a dashboard, it can show a bar chart of the 10 terms with the most sessions.

What Good Looks Like

There’s no target. A term with a Zero-Result Rate of 0% isn’t automatically healthy. Check Avg Results too: a term that always returns 2 or 3 results has a thin result set.

A term with many sessions and a high Conversion Rate is demand you already serve.

What to Do About It

  • A high Zero-Result Rate: stock the product, add the word to your product titles or tags, or add a search synonym.
  • A low Avg Results: widen the results with a tag, a synonym or a collection.
  • A term with many sessions and no conversions: open a search for it on your store and check what visitors see first.

Search vs Non-Search Sessions shows whether visitors who search buy more than those who don’t.

Get AI Insight at the top of the report asks Copilot for a short read of it.

Where to Find It

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