For years, I’ve watched a quiet pattern play out across teams of every size. There’s the story an organization tells itself about who its audience is. And then there’s the evidence the actual audience leaves behind. Those two things rarely match cleanly, and the gap between them is where most of the real strategic work sits.
You see this most clearly in digital marketing and analytics. Tools change (just look at the “maps“). Dashboards get shinier. But the signals from real people landing on your site, trying to find something, hesitating, searching, furiously clicking, backing up, trying again? Those signals barely drift at all.
It’s part of why I keep returning to search behavior as one of the most honest sources of truth you can access for free. Web search (from Google or Bing) shows what people hope you offer. Internal site search shows what they couldn’t find. And the trails they leave afterward show how they recover when the path isn’t clear.
I’ve been lucky to trade notes about this with Alan Etkin at BCIT, who thinks about analytics with a level of care most of us only aspire to. He has this habit of watching long-term patterns instead of chasing short-term novelty that frustrates sales but thrills marketers. One of his recent observations surprised me. Even with question-answer LLMs everywhere, he hasn’t seen a meaningful shift toward long-form questions in on-site search analytics. Humans are still typing the same short, intent-heavy bursts we’ve used for years. Familiar. Direct. A little stubborn.
Meanwhile, the analytics landscape is becoming stranger and more interesting. Plenty of traffic is now coming from Gemini, Copilot, Perplexity, or some hybrid of traditional search and LLMs, and it’s increasingly difficult to tell which is which in dashboards. Yet the numbers coming directly from LLMs still seems fairly small, and the number using conversational search on site? Vanishingly smaller. While search engines are re-writing the top of the funnel with conversational search, the people who do reach your site still behave like… normal people. They search in the quickest way they know. They try to solve their problem with as few keystrokes as possible. They abandon quickly if they can’t.
This is why internal search data is such a goldmine. In a 2022 study across hundreds of websites, internal search users were found to be 2.6 times more likely to convert than non-search users. Alan has found the same. They’re your most motivated visitors. If a significant chunk of their searches end with “no results,” that’s not a failure of marketing. It’s a failure of clarity. Roughly 20-30% of site visitors use internal search on content-heavy sites like universities, governments, business services and many nonprofits. And that’s a data set most teams aren’t even looking at.
Pair that with the behavioral evidence and the story gets even sharper. A 2023 Microsoft Clarity analysis found that 57 percent of user sessions include rapid page backtracking, a signal of what they call “dead-end frustration” (and if you’re not using Clarity, you should!). People land on a page, don’t see what they expected, backtrack, search, and sometimes leave for good. If you’ve ever watched Clarity session maps on a high-traffic site, you’ve seen this dance clear as day.
Then there’s the frontier. Alan has been experimenting with using the Model Context Protocol to query Google Analytics in plain language. It’s still early, but it hints at a future where analysts stop wrangling interfaces and start asking real, historically difficult-to-surface questions like which user journeys correlate with revenue. It’s slowly giving better access to the truth already in front of you.
But even in this emerging world, human behavior remains steady. A 2024 study of user search habits found that keyword-style searches still outnumber natural-language queries by more than 6 to 1 in on-site search boxes (Baymard Institute, 2024 Ecommerce UX findings). People haven’t suddenly started talking to websites the way they talk to ChatGPT. They’re still using the patterns years of search engines have trained into them.
That’s the digital layer. It’s where Alan lives most of the time, though he ties everything back to the institution’s financial picture. He can tell you what the BCIT site earns, where enrollment interest surges or softens, and which journeys correlate with successful applications. That kind of thinking is the real model for modern marketing leadership. Digital analytics aren’t the whole picture, but they are the clearest early signals of what’s shifting.
Senior marketers crave the kind of data one level up. Alongside digital behavior, we (should) track things like:
- pipeline velocity
- qualified-to-opportunity conversion
- CAC and payback periods
- contribution to revenue
- sales cycle length
- retention patterns
- competitive share of voice and content velocity
Those metrics matter because they measure the health of the system. Digital analytics matter because they measure the movement within it. When you stitch them together, you get a view that’s wide enough for strategy and sharp enough for action.
This is where dashboards can be powerful if done with discipline. Not as a wall of charts, but as a single narrative surface. A place where search behavior, traffic intent, enrollment / pipeline lifts, and revenue contribution all sit side by side. A dashboard should work the way a good story works. It should show you where attention is going, where friction is growing, and where the next question lives.
I keep returning to this because I’ve seen it save organizations years of drift. The truth is usually already available. Not in a forecast or a slide (sorry Deloitte), but in what people actually try to do on your site. In the words they type when they’re searching for something you promised but didn’t make obvious. In the friction they hit when the path doesn’t match their expectation.
You can learn a lot from big models and long dashboards. But if you want to understand your audience in the present tense, digital search behavior will tell you. It will tell you what they care about. It will tell you where you’re strong or weak. It will tell you whether the story you’re telling is the story they’re hearing. It will tell you long before anything else does. And often, it will tell you for free.
If you look closely, the truth is leaving breadcrumbs. The work is learning to see them.