I somewhat recently wrote an article on how to determine the width of an internal search box. However; this post do not debate whether you should have an internal search tool to begin with and if so, how prominent you should feature it. So please notice the previous post as a successor to this post, as I suggest one investigate visit search behaviour before branching out into analyzing usability elements such as search box WIDTH. I believe it is possible to segment visits (not visitors) into largely two distinct direction-finding groups:

• Search-dominant visits
• Navigation-dominant visits
• Bounces*

Before debating how we set up the segments described above in our Web Analytics Tool - I would like to add a comment on why I think this is a significant discovery. First of all, I strongly believe and find it common sense, that making a visitor suffer through poor direction finding elements (traditional navigation or internal search) is bad for business. And “poor” is defined as in not being able to find the content one is looking for.

A segmentation suggestion could be along these lines (whereas other metric filters spring to mind as well), but

Search-dominant visit segment

• Exclude all bounces (a bounce used as a definition of a visitor who used neither traditional navigation or Internal Search)
• Include all visitors who searched on the first page of their visit path

Navigation-dominant visit segment

• Exclude all bounces (a bounce used as a definition of a visitor who used neither traditional navigation or Internal Search)
• Exclude all visitors who searched on the first page of their visit path

Bounce segment

• Include all bounces (1 page view visits)

Example
Let’s try it out and have a look at my grand little blog here (which holds basic navigation and an internal search). I set up 3 segments as described above and applied them to a basic visit report.

(As you can see; focus should not be too much on Search, which is generally the fact on most blogs, but I am most sure you see the value of this beyond blogs)

Conclusion
If you have predominately Search-dominant visitors then you should engage in serious usability analysis about how to incorporate internal search into your overall site navigation - this including such elements like how to determine the width of your internal search box. Usability studies that are likely to tell you that you are far better of listing the 5 most searched for terms than expanding you traditional navigation.

On the other hand, if you have predominately navigation-dominant users, you will be wasting valuable screen real-estate on search elements not used - and not only that, you will be sending your users down a path they are not comfortable with. So perform the above analysis to figure out which path (search or navigation) you should focus on.

.. And remember that this is most likely different from section to section of your web property.