We've recently been enabling Google Analytics site-search tracking for a number of CommerceV3 website clients.
It's always fruitful to see what people are searching for on your site, how frequently they buy and what they spend. Users of on-site search tend to be higher-converting and have higher AOV than non-users.
Avinash Kaushik's 2006 post on optimizing on-site search is still quite relevant. One thing Avinash finds is a roughly 10% benchmark for site search usage, i.e. the fraction of all visitors who use your site search. I've always thought 10% is a low number, but it does align with what we have seen for a number of different websites over the years.
One perspective to add is that someone who abandons a website after a single page view (i.e., bounce rate) can't possibly use on-site search. So if you subtract your bounce rate (say 35%) from the total visitors, and then calculate on-site search usage, you get a truer ratio — more like 15% of all visitors who stick around for more than one page.
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