Troubleshooting GA4: Enhanced measurement not tracking view_search_results event properly

[Mia]

The issue you’re encountering might be due to how your search results page path is structured. The enhanced measurement in Google Analytics 4 (GA4) looks for certain URL structures to automatically generate the view_search_results event. By default, GA4 enhanced measurement interprets URLs with ‘search’, ‘query’, or ‘keyword’ as Search Results type pages. However, it does not account for other query parameter labels or different URL structures. If your website’s search parameter is something other than what GA4 automatically detects, then GA4 might only record the page_view event, not the view_search_results.

You can verify this by checking the configuration and the structure of your URLs. Make sure that the URLs match what GA4 is looking for – like “q”, “query”, “s”, “search”, “searchword”, and “keyword”. If the search parameter differs, you might need to tweak the GA4 configuration or adjust the URLs. Alteratively, you could use the GA4 data stream settings to manually specify the search parameter label in ‘More Tagging Settings’ under the ‘Site Search’ section.

[Madison]

The issue might be related to your URL configuration. The Enhanced Measurement in GA4 tracks search queries based on the URL parameter you specified. It defaults to “query”, but if your site search mechanism uses a different URL parameter, you’ll have to adapt the settings to reflect that. If the URL parameter is correct, it could be possible that the search event is being filtered out due to other filters in your GA settings. It would be worth checking those and making sure your configuration settings are in line with the site’s structure. You can also run a test search on your site and look out for the “view_search_results” event in DebugView. If it doesn’t show up, then there’s a chance the setup might need tweaking.