user behavior Archives | Blog

Optimize Your Search Merchandising for the Holidays

Posted by Shaun RyanSeptember 17, 2013Analytics, Merchandising, Newsletter, Related Search, SEO, Site Search

As an eCommerce professional, you’ve likely been preparing for the holiday shopping season for months – deciding which products to feature, planning orders and organizing marketing campaigns. Retailers predict an 11-20% rise in holiday spending for 2013, with eCommerce and mobile driving much of the growth (Retail TouchPoints, Aug. 12). While the opportunity is great, so is the challenge of making your products stand out. Here are some thoughts on how you can use search merchandising tactics to ensure your holiday campaigns are effective.

Get Insight from your Site Search Data

The first step in successful search merchandising is to look at your site search data for real-time insight into users’ behavior. Review the queries that shoppers type into your search box, along with your site analytics. Which searches are most popular? Do shoppers want a product you don’t have? Are they seeing “no results pages” because they search using different language than you use on your site? Do they move from your results pages to a purchase, or do they jump away from your site without buying?

If you gather such insights from your search data now, you’ll have time to make improvements well before Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you don’t already have an advanced site search provider, engaging in such services now can give you the extra set of hands and tools you’ll need to be agile in response to holiday trends.

Use the Right Tools at the Right Time

The second step of a successful search merchandising plan is to know which tools can make the most impact, and how to use them. A couple of my favorite tools for holiday merchandising are landing pages and gift finders.

Landing Pages for Holiday Products: In most cases a relevant search results page is the best page to show your visitors when they type in a search term. However in some cases you want to have more control over their experience and a specialized landing page may be the right tool. For seasonal specials, simply create a web page with your top holiday merchandise and set the page to load when visitors type certain words like Holiday, Christmas or Hanukkah into the search box. Assign a dedicated URL to your holiday landing page, and then use it in holiday email campaigns and advertising. Not only does this promote your holiday specials, but it gives you a trackable link in your Google Analytics so you can gauge the success of the campaign.
Gift Finders: Gift Finders are another way to generate more sales revenue around the holidays. Set up refinements that allow someone to define a set of criteria for a gift – e.g. price, occasion, recipient type and gift type – then see a list of the products that match those criteria. Promote your gift finder on your home page or by using a landing page with a PPC link for email and ad campaigns. When done correctly, it can be a useful tool that increases users’ likelihood of buying from your site. Read more about gift finders in this blog from SLI Systems Co-Founder Geoff Brash.

Branding banners, ribbon overlays and integration of social media are other merchandising tools that can improve the odds of holiday shopper conversion. These and a dozen other tools are covered in the new white paper “Using Site Search Data to Improve Merchandising,” which is a free download from the SLI Systems website.

Lastly, be sure your site search provider offers proper merchandising controls for your site so you can quickly test and easily refine the presentation of promotional messages, products and content on your search and navigation pages. Such agility will help you compete for consumers’ spending money during the holidays and beyond.

Customer Success: Natural Wellbeing

Posted by JoeRSeptember 17, 2013Navigation, Newsletter, Refinements, Related Search, Rich Auto Complete, SEO, Site Search

Natural Wellbeing is a site rich with reports, reviews and expert advice about the holistic and natural wellness products they offer. Such quality content can really help move shoppers through purchase decisions – especially for a natural health products site, where first-time buyers can be skeptical. But in order to be useful, the content has to be easily searchable and relevant to the needs of each individual buyer.

When Natural Wellbeing signed with SLI Systems in 2009, I saw a great opportunity to help them bring their rich content into their site search capability. They had a blog, an active social media presence, and a wiki with well-written descriptions of every herbal ingredient that their certified therapists use. But none of these resources were tied to the search results page. We worked closely with them to implement a number of changes.

One change was to create a tabbed format to include relevant blogs, wiki content and Facebook content onto each search results page. In the below screen shot, you can see that a search for “sleep” now shows 44 related product results on the product tab, and there are additional tabs for accessing related blogs (1), wiki articles (36) and Facebook posts (62).

We also created a set of refinements for them (see the left column in the above screen shot), where users can narrow down the search results by rating, price range, brand, category or subcategory. For example, if a user wants to look at only formulas that contain blends of different herbs and doesn’t want to spend more than $20, they can click the $10 – $20 range in Price Range and Formulas in Subcategory. This narrows the number of product results from 44 to 25, as shown below. From that point, the user may want to look at ratings and read more about the products to decide which they want to purchase.

Since SLI’s site search continually learns and improves, the relevancy of search results improves over time. Natural Wellbeing realizes the benefit of letting SLI’s learning search do its work – it frees them from having to constantly tune results, allowing them to focus on other priorities in their business.

Both Natural Wellbeing and its sister site Pet Wellbeing also use SLI’s Site Champion product, which keeps improving SEO without any work on their part. Site Champion uses visitors’ site behavior to automatically create optimized landing pages that are indexed by Google and other Internet search engines.

In March of this year, I worked with them to add SLI’s Rich Auto Complete, which auto-displays product listings and images based on what users are typing in the search box. Since users can click on these products directly from the search box, the feature shortens the path from searching to buying, which creates a better user experience and improves conversions. Since adding Rich Auto Complete, the sites have received significantly higher page views, search users and search result clicks.

Now I’m working on ways we can help with their push for growth. I heard what they’re doing with email marketing, for example and showed them the types of custom templates and landing pages we can create for those campaigns. I’ve let them know what’s working well for others and have developed solutions that will help them achieve their current goals. It is through casual and interactive conversation that we come up with solutions that make a real impact. Being an extension of our customers’ team is what I and all SLI Customer Success Managers strive for.

SLI Blog

About SLI Systems

Learn

Connect