Optimize Your ecommerce Site Search

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1 Optimize Your ecommerce Site Search 17 key capabilities to increase revenue with high-impact search on your ecommerce site 1

2 INTRO Deliver a customer experience-driven commerce. As an ecommerce expert, you know how important search is. It s the ear of your business to listen to your customers. For instance, with search, you know when your customers will start buying your seasonal products from their search activity on your site. On the flip side, search is the only way to quickly showcase what your customers are looking for in this ever impatient world. However, you must provide a personalized experience with relevant recommendations. If not, they will jump over to your competitor s website or a public search engine with the same queries, and the best SEO optimizer will win. Don t let this happen. Deliver on your brand promise with a personalized and relevant experience for every visitor. What can site search and personalization do in ecommerce? Retailers who invest in personalization see a 19 percent increase in sales. 1 Nearly three out of four customers are frustrated when content is not personalized to their interest. 2 Conversion rates through site search can be up to 50 percent higher on average.³

3 The Search Box 80% of US adults know what they want when they are on your site. 4 Such buyers will go to the search box first - which is why it needs to be optimized

4 #1 Make it prominent PLACE THE SEARCH BOX IN A STRATEGIC SPACE OF YOUR HOME PAGE Don t make customers search for the search box. Place it at the top right corner of every page, as people have grown accustomed to looking there first. Another popular and user-friendly trend is placing it in the center, just under your site header. 43% of site consumers use site search first when looking for a product or category. 5 search... MAKE IT WIDE ENOUGH Most queries are one to three words long, but a best practice is to review the query history of your site, and set a width that would enable 80% of these queries to fit in your search box without scrolling. If you don t yet have access to your site s query history, start with a search box that can fit 25 characters. For greater flexibility, make the search box expandable, so when a visitor clicks on the box it gets bigger and easier to use. 25 char. or more search 5 4

5 #2 Make it mobile MAKE IT MOBILE-FRIENDLY Mobile site visitors rely upon search more heavily, due to the limited screen real estate and touch interfaces. Ensure your search box is sized properly for easy touchscreen operation. Nearly ⅓ of all retail ecommerce sales will come from a mobile device by the end of 2018.⁶ 46 percent of mobile users want relevant offers and coupons⁷ 47 percent like to receive locationspecific app content - think contextual recommendations.⁷ #3 Keep it simple LABEL IT Ensure your visitors know your search box is your search box! A common practice is to mark the box with a magnifying glass icon like this: You can also include some guidance as a watermark in your search box by adjusting the parameters that come in the search box view rendering, to create a search box like this: type your search info here ONLY ONE SEARCH BOX PER PAGE Don t confuse your buyers with multiple search options on a single page. If you want to offer a larger search box on certain pages of your site, hide the site s main search box in the header of all site pages medium=pr&utm_source=press_release 5

6 #4 Make it smart FOCUS THEIR CURSOR ON SEARCH, RIGHT AWAY Make it easy for visitors by placing the active cursor on the search box when they first enter the site (your frequent customers will really appreciate this). SUGGEST QUERIES AND CONTENT AS THEY TYPE As soon as visitors start typing, suggest queries with keywords from your taxonomy or based upon queries often performed by others. You can also recommend specific content as they type too. Suggested queries and results help visitors who might not know exactly what to search for or how to spell it find what they need faster. ALWAYS RETURN RESULTS If a visitor mistypes a search query, your search engine should not return a No Results message. Instead, direct them to a search results page and display suggested search results or offer did you mean options. #5 Test it A/B TEST YOUR SEARCH BOX Type your search here Regularly A/B test your search box for location, behavior and other best practice features we ve discussed so far. The right intelligent search solution will provide you with the analytics you need to evaluate search performance easily. 6

7 The Results Page Think of your results page as your online personal concierge. Listen to your customers queries, provide visually interesting content and anticipate their needs with your results page. boots women s fashion boots fuschia boots men s boots trail hiking boots 7

8 #6 Make your search results human friendly FOCUS ON THE RESULTS On a search page, your visitor s focus should be drawn to the search results. If your site header/banner is large, auto-scroll to the top of the search results list once a query is performed. Be careful with the size of banners and headers on the results page. Requiring your visitors to scroll to the result section after performing a search can be frustrating, so use an anchor on the page to avoid this practice. If the user changes something with their search, for example by unselecting a facet, they should be able to return to their previous spot rather than going to the top of the page. LIMIT THE NUMBER OF FACETS Facets help visitors quickly drill down on their search results but offering too many, or irrelevant facets, can make things confusing. The number and nature of facets you display can (and should) vary based on the query and results themselves, but best practice is to not let the facet list exceed the length of the result list itself. BE SPARING WITH MOBILE FACETS On mobile search pages you should be even more selective with facets, due again to the limited real estate. Determine your three most popular facets and offer those on your mobile site. Or select a search solution that enables dynamic faceting, which displays the best facets based upon the specific query, user, or results. 8

9 fuschia shoes fuschia shoes PROVIDE A RESPONSIVE RESULT PAGE Facets help to narrow down to the right product however, your search page should not be reloading every time as it may be slow, especially on a mobile device with a limited bandwidth. BE FLEXIBLE WHEN IT COMES TO LANGUAGE Visitors often use different terms to describe the same thing (lifts, elevators, etc.), and your site search should take those human differences into account. To deliver the desired search results, ensure your search solution provides an integrated thesaurus so synonyms can be easily mapped. Do not hardcode everything as things evolve and you will not be able to keep up. Leverage machine learning capabilities to be able to adapt quickly. Lifts 1001 Results for lifts, elevators, escalators... 9

10 #7 Make your search results comprehensive MAKE EVERYTHING YOUR VISITORS NEED FINDABLE. Many organizations fail to ensure all the products their customers need and want is searchable. This often includes product information residing beyond your CMS or WCM, in product catalogs, document management systems, third party sites, or elsewhere. Be sure your search solution enables the swift unified indexing of every source system where assets resides, which may even reside with a third party. INDEX THE HTML BODY OF PAGES & CONTENT OF DOCUMENTS By default, many basic site search solutions will only index the metadata of your web pages and site content, and not the actual body of content itself. For optimal findability, leverage a solution that can index the HTML representation of your site pages and the content of any documents you want visitors to find, regardless of format. This includes PDFs, MS Office files, and any fields within structured content that contain information you want visitors to leverage. 10

11 #8 Make it easy for users to assess relevance OFFER A QUICK VIEW CAPABILITY Help visitors quickly determine if a search result will be useful to them by enabling instant HTML-rendered previews of any result, especially for rich PDF files. This is a big time saver for your visitors as they no longer have to download an entire document to determine if it s relevant to their needs. For products, customers will appreciate seeing the different color options of a product on a larger image instead of loading the product page. PROVIDE HIT HIGHLIGHTING & EXCERPTS In your search result templates, offer a relevant summary or excerpt from the product page to help visitors understand why the page matched their query. Highlighting keywords within the excerpt/summary makes it even more helpful. 11

12 shoes PERSONALIZE, PERSONALIZE, PERSONALIZE. Your ecommerce site search is the foundation of your personalization. Instead of manually tagging content, products and profiles, use machine learning to automatically recommend the most relevant and optimized result to every customer. If a company doesn t personalize communications, more than half of consumers report that they are somewhat likely to switch brands. 8 Sitecore provides best-in-class personalization tools in xdb, empowering your marketing team to target your customers precisely by tagging engagement value, profiles and patterns. Imagine how much more powerful your personalization can be when you harness the power of machine learning to continuously learn and improve the user experience - automatically. AI-powered search engines help by observing the behavior and journey of every user, and fine-tuning the recommendations to create a relevant and personalized experience

13 #9 Create search-driven product pages. Once you ve mastered the art of providing a good search foundation on your website, it s time to build on that investment and use search to drive product pages on your website. A great place to start is on your listing pages. Listing pages itemize content of the same type to make it convenient for visitors. #10 Anticipate your customers needs. Master the cross-sell and upsell by automatically delivering relevant and personalized product recommendations. Don t wait for your customer to input a query; show them what previous customers have also viewed and purchased. Or when the buyer checkouts with a product, recommend recommend similiar relevant products. A majority of consumers expect that by 2020, companies will be able to anticipate their needs and personalize recommendations - before they make contact blog/2016/12/consumers-want-morepersonalized-marketing.html 13

14 #11 No datapoint left behind. Use every contextual clue you have to personalize every aspect of the shopping experience. From their browsing and purchase history to their location, leverage your search usage analytics to understand what content and products the visitor will be interested in, and automatically guide them to your products. Leading ecommerce companies have started to hire applied scientists to help them build the best product catalog by building advanced algorithms and models to ensure the right information is displayed to the right customer. It used to be an online merchant job, but now it is in PhD s court. More than 1 out of 2 consumers report that they are willing to trade data in exchange for product recommendations and personalized shopping experiences. 10 Not all organizations can afford to hire hundreds of doctoral degree holders; this is why you should leverage AI-powered search and recommendation solutions available on the market

15 Search Analytics and Reporting Get the insights you need to understand your customers online needs. 15

16 #12 Track visitor activity Collecting the right data about how your customers search for and use content on your site is crucial to success. Your search solution needs to enable you to easily collect, analyze, and report upon the essential search-related performance metrics: ÎÎ Search volume: The number of queries performed on the website to ensure your search is used adequately by your buyers and to calculate ratio of successful conversion. ÎÎ Queries and keywords: What are the most popular query formulations and choices of keywords? This answer will be particularly useful to optimize your product information and product availability. ÎÎ Average click rank: The average rank of results being clicked to end a search session. If your click rank is too high, it means you are losing a lot of potential customers. You will realize, by leveraging heat maps, that your visitors will only see the top results and a few in the middle of the page. ÎÎ Click through rate: The rate at which people are clicking on results after performing a search query. A low click through rate means you are not showing relevant results. Î Î Queries that returned no results. When you show a no result page, as a seller, you are essentially telling your buyer that you do not have the product nor nothing else to recommend. That should not happen! Hence, monitor to ensure you do not receive queries with no results. 16

17 #13 Slice-and-dice by attribute The example in the last section used dimensions, metrics, and filters. By combining the three together, you have a rich toolbox which can be used to visualize everything happening with search on your site. While activity-related metrics are essential for optimizing search and the overall performance of your website, you also need to ensure that your solution allows you to capture and slice and dice these metrics over the dimensions that are important to your business. ÎÎKeywords & documents clicked Î ÎBrowser & OS used Î ÎDevice & physical location Î ÎVisitor persona or profile Î ÎExplicit visitor identity 82% more conversions after initiating weekly search monitoring and optimization. 11 #14 Pay attention to every search experience Chances are that you ll use search to power multiple pages on your website: a global search page, multiple search-driven content pages, and possibly dedicated, more narrowly-scoped search pages. Search behavior can be quite varied from one search UI to another, so it is a best practice to monitor & optimize them independently. Make sure that your solution has the flexibility to track each search experience independently and allows you to create reports that isolate search statistics per search interface

18 #15 Map search activities to KPIs Outcomes that measure site performance - such as conversions, customer retention rate, cart abandonment rate, shopping cart activity, cancel form submissions - are what really matter. Ensure your search solution can map search activity to custom events that are important for your site. With this additional data you ll be able base your optimization decisions on the metrics your business cares about. #16 Curate your merchandise. Every query with low relevance is an indication that you need to improve your results or even review your merchandise, and an opportunity to move your customer to conversion. There will always be some queries that are not relevant to your product offerings, but double-check that the most common keywords always link to relevant synonyms or content. A simple and effective method is to look at all the queries that are not performing well (identified by low click through, high average click rank, or returning no results) and do one of the following: ÎÎCreate thesaurus entries related to those keywords in your current taxonomy ÎÎMake a strategic decision for poorly performing keywords, such as introducing new products or simply reviewing your existing product information ÎÎTag existing product pages with those keywords By curating your merchandise this way, you ll ensure relevant and natural results. #17 Curate your experience. Simple search interfaces are often the most efficient ones. And the right search analytics can provide you with valuable information to help optimize your search interface. Analyze visitor interactions with your search interface to find out what facet and sort options your visitors use most often. Based on that, remove the options that are not used, reorder features and controls based on their popularity, and try some new options with the new real estate you just created. Iteration is often a good way to find out the best UX your visitors will really use. 18

19 Conclusion Personalized shopping experiences improved conversion by 51 percent & the average order value (AOV) by 36 percent. 12 It s now possible to deliver those experiences and see that level of conversion by personalizing the site search on your ecommerce site. You don t need to hire an army of data scientists to manage your algorithms; AI-powered search can do that for you. With today s technologies, you will not only learn a lot about your buyers preferences, but also execute on your ambitious ecommerce strategy and business objectives by leveraging machine learning Contact us to learn more about how you can improve the ecommerce experience on your site. CONTACT US 19

20 About Coveo tm Make Business Personal. Coveo uses intelligent search and AI technologies to personalize every digital experience for customers, partners, dealers, and employees. Coveo combines unified content, unified interactions and machine learning to deliver relevant information and recommendations across every business interaction, making websites, ecommerce, contact centers and intranets effortless, efficient and content-rich. Coveo is also embedded in many leading business applications from vendors including Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sitecore, Xero and more. Coveo partners with the world s largest enterprise technology players and has more than 1,500 activations in mid-to-large sized global organizations across multiple industries. Stay up to date on the latest Coveo news and content by subscribing to the Coveo blog, and following Coveo on LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. 20