Google is making it easier for site owners who use Google Custom Search to add Google Analytics Site Search tracking from their custom search engine.

“Google Analytics Site Search reports provide extensive data on how people search your site once they are already on it.  You can see initial searches, refinements, search trends, which pages they searched from, where they ended up, and conversion correlation.  In the past we admit that setup was a little challenging,” says Google software engineer Zhong Wang.

“If you are already a Google Analytics user (and your site has the Google Analytics tracking code on its pages), go to the Custom Search Engine management page, select your CSE’s control panel and click on Google Analytics from the left-hand menu,” explains Wang. “We’ll display a list of your Google Analytics web properties so you can select one and tell us the query and category parameters that you want to track.”

When changes are saved, Google generates a new code snippet that you can copy and paste into your site. Then, you can access Site Search reports from the content section in Google Analytics.

In other Google Analytics news, sites in German got the go ahead to start using it, as Google announced in a German blog post. More on that here.