Click Analytics and CTR — Track What Users Actually Click
Search Analytics
Click Analytics and CTR
Knowing what people search for is only half the picture. Click Analytics shows you which results they actually engage with — and which they ignore.
Three Views of Click Data
1
Top Clicked
Which documents get the most clicks across ALL search queries.
Best for:
Finding your most popular content. These pages matter most to your users.
2
By Query
Click-through rate for each search query individually.
“winter boots”68%
“product manual”31%
“return policy”8%
Best for:
Comparing engagement across queries. High impressions + low CTR = relevance problem.
3
Low CTR
Action
High-impression queries where nobody clicks. These need fixing.
“shipping cost”
2% CTR
“store hours”
4% CTR
“warranty info”
5% CTR
Best for:
Finding queries where results appear but don't satisfy users. Pin better docs or improve content.
How Click Tracking Works
Automatic Collection
Every time a user clicks a search result, the click is recorded with the query, the document URL, and the result position. No extra integration code needed — the Opensolr Search UI handles it automatically.
IP-Deduplicated
Click counts are deduplicated by IP address. One user clicking the same result 20 times counts as one click. This gives you accurate engagement metrics, not inflated numbers from bots or repeated clicks.
Rate-Limited
Click recording is rate-limited to prevent abuse. Automated scrapers or bots hammering your search won't pollute your analytics data.
What to Do With Low CTR Queries
A low click-through rate means users see results but don't find them useful. This is a relevance problem, and there are several ways to fix it:
- Pin a better result — use Query Elevation to force the most relevant page to the top for that query
- Exclude bad results — if irrelevant pages are showing up, exclude them via elevation rules or URL exclusion in search.xml
- Improve your content — if the page title and description don't match what users expect, update them on your site and recrawl
- Add synonyms — if the right page exists but uses different terminology, add synonyms so it matches the query
Where to Find It
Open your Opensolr Control Panel, go to your index, and click Query Analytics in the sidebar. The Click Analytics tab gives you three sub-views: Top Clicked, By Query, and Low CTR. IP data older than 90 days is automatically cleaned up, keeping your dashboard focused on recent behavior.
Search doesn't end when results appear. It ends when users click.
Click Analytics tells you whether your results are actually useful. Fix the low-CTR queries and your search gets measurably better.