Send search analytics for Google Analytics 4

[garrettheel]

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• I've read the contribution guidelines and wholeheartedly agree

I want to suggest an idea and checked that ...

• ... to my best knowledge, my idea wouldn't break something for other users
• ... the documentation does not mention anything about my idea
• ... there are no open or closed issues that are related to my idea

Description

It'd be great if mkdocs-material would send search queries to GA4.

#1658 was the previous implementation of this for Universal Analytics (UA-*)

Use Cases

This would help to understand how documentation is being used and improve the ranking of pages.

Screenshots / Mockups

No response

[squidfunk]

Thanks for reporting! The problem with site search tracking in GA 4 is that it's very complicated to set up, which is why it's not considered to be in-scope. This is also mentioned in the documentation in "how to measure site search usage".

[garrettheel]

@squidfunk I understand that it's a little tougher to set up on the Google Analytics side, but I think it would still be nice if mkdocs-material fired a custom event for search so that the data is somehow available. I suppose it can be hacked around with custom javascript, but would be a pretty common use case.

[squidfunk]

If you would like to work on this, we can integrate it. Unfortunately, I currently don't have the bandwidth to do so. We would need a snippet to send the data, similar to the following code:

mkdocs-material/src/partials/integrations/analytics/google.html

Lines 73 to 81 in b405149

	if (document.forms.search) {
	var query = document.forms.search.query
	query.addEventListener("blur", function() {
	if (this.value) {
	var path = document.location.pathname;
	ga("send", "pageview", path + "?q=" + this.value)
	}
	})
	}

... and documentation, which explains how to configure Google Analytics to pick up the query. The code snippet has to go into the same file, but into the GA4 section. If you can provide both in a PR, I'm happy to merge it.

[garrettheel]

@squidfunk created #3184