Find fun questions in your web referer logs with Google Analytics

I know that reviewing web referer logs is nothing new, but Google Analytics lets you filter your view. One use for this is to find search queries that were posed in the form of a question using the common question-forming words who, what, when, where, why and how.

Perhaps undocumented, but well-known to programmers, is the technique of concatenating terms with a pipe character (the “|”) which means “or”. This way, we can create a single filter containing all those words at once.

Try it out, see what kind of questions people were asking that resulted in a click-through to your site. Maybe you can add content to your site that better answers some of those questions and help future visitors who ask a similar question.

Tags: search, Google Analytics, questions, filter