On Site Search – measurement, KPIs, SEO, online copy
On Site Search – measurement, KPIs, SEO, online copy
Onsite search is one of the most important features for visitors of your website. In many cases onsite search is your visitor’s default behaviour, instead of using the standard website navigation they will immediately browse using the search box and input whatever they are looking for.
Onsite search is even more important when the website contains more data and becomes more complex for your visitors.
“Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing” – Wernher von Braun
Onsite Search Metrics
Tagging onsite search
There are some metrics to consider when we want to understand if our onsite search is engaging and if it is really effective as we think it is. The list below is my personal favorite to use as a rule of thumb. Mind you, you would probably need to come up with more metrics relevant to your business later on.
Search terms
This is rather trivial. The data set should include all the search terms that were submitted via your website search box. When sorting this data set in descending order you will get the most popular search terms on your website.
Search terms per page
This is where it starts to get interesting. For some reason, online businesses often assume that visitors will be only searching from the Homepage, which is so far from the truth. In reality, visitors are submitting searches from different pages. If your website was tagged in a logical directory structure you will get some invaluable insight on trends in onsite search with regards to directories and pages.
Depth of search
Say you sell commodity products on your website. A visitor is submitting a search and gets a result set back from the server. The result set is relatively large and might be divided into more than one page.
If you followed the previous recommendation then your search pages have already been tagged, but we could get some more insight if we tag the number of the results the visitor got and the way they engage with the result pages.
“Why do I need that information” you ask? Many of your visitors do in fact find what they were looking for but it may be on the second or third page of the result set. Wouldn’t it be great to add these pages to your “Best bets” mechanism so the next time a visitor searches for the same thing they will actually find it on the first result page, instead of leaving the site because they can’t be bothered to navigate through the rest of the search result pages.
Zero result search terms
This data set should include all the search terms that visitors submitted via your website search box which resulted in zero results.
Zero yield search terms
This data set should include all the search terms that visitors submitted via your website search box which resulted in data that was returned from the server but the visitor never clicked on a single item on the result pages.
Search terms conversion
This data set should include all the search terms that resulted in a conversion.
So far so good. Now we have we have 6 reports that we can run in order to get more insight with regards to our website and on site search.
Can we derive REAL KPI’s from that? YES WE CAN!
KPI’s
KPI: Percentage of zero result search terms
Description: This will show the percentage of all the pages that resulted in zero result for search terms that visitors submitted using your website search box. Ideally you would like to keep this value as low as you can, if that is not the case you might need to take a closer look on your search terms that visitors are using.
How to calculate: Total Number of page views for the “Zero Result Search Terms” pages / Total number of page views for the Search Result pages.
Insight: You could map all these terms that visitors are looking for to an appropriate result set.
KPI: Percentage of zero yield search terms
Description: This will show the percentage of all the pages that resulted in a result set from the server but the visitor never engaged with the result set. Ideally you would like to keep this value as low as you can, if that is not the case you might need to take a closer look into the search terms that visitors are using and the result set they are getting back from the server.
How to calculate: Total number of page views for the “Zero yield search terms” pages / Total number of page views for the Search Result pages.
Insight: You might want to make the result set more relevant and appealing to the search terms.
Always keep your eyes open and learn from your competitor’s mistakes. You might be surprised but a good website search mechanism and design is where many websites fail. This is where your business could potentially shine.
Onsite Search Best Practices
Tagging search will improve your website usability and therefore provide a better experience for your visitor. Please keep in mind that all the best practices below could not have been recommended unless they were tagged to begin with!
Advanced Search
Many online businesses have the advanced search feature on their website’s. Unfortunately, not too many visitors are using that option since it usually requires some sort of technical skill to use “Search Operators”, additionally they usually encounter typos which makes your visitors even more frustrated. Just look at the bounce rate from your advanced search page and you will see this for yourself. If you don’t have to have it there, just remove it.
Search the web
Don’t offer that option on your website (unless you are getting a huge ROI as an affiliate which is not the case for most websites out there). Visitors came to your website to engage with your content, streams etc. so why are you sending them back to the web? If they are looking for something that they cannot find on your website they know how to use Google, Yahoo and MSN.
‘Best bets’ is basically a manually created list for a common queries performed on your website search engine. The whole idea behind it is to “inform” the search engine on your website that even though a specific page won’t come out or it comes up really low in the result pages returned from your server, that there are better matching results for that query. In essence, it should return more relevant results for the visitor and increase engagement with the result set. (Think SEO – it is really the same concept)
Spelling
The search feature on your website should have a spelling checker to recognise all possible common misspellings. Visitors might have misspelt a product name and since they could not find it on your site they would look for it on another site. Wouldn’t you do the same?
Modified Query
When the result set that is sent back from the server shows the original search term in the search box enabling the visitor to amend it so that they can resubmit the search. Visitors don’t like to go back and forwards to a search page as you might see from your web analytics reports.
Thats it, you are good to go and start getting insight from your Onsite search. If you got any questions please, feel free to post a comment below.
