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Site Search Helps Fill Cienas B2B Sales Lead Pipeline

Posted by geoffbJune 22, 2010eCommerce, Site Search

No matter if you’re selling products, services or information online, to be successful, site visitors must be able to quickly and easily find what they came for – or they will leave, often never to return.

Our customer Ciena, a leader in network infrastructure is a good example. The company relies on its website for lead generation, and thus offers a great deal of educational materials on its site – i.e. whitepapers, product data sheets, videos and webinars – all designed to capture the interest of potential clients.

Ciena’s previous site search solution wasn’t resulting in the leads the company needed. They didn’t have visibility into how their visitors were moving through the site after conducting a search and weren’t confident visitors were finding useful information to download. Adding to the problem was the inability for their previous site search solution to integrate with any type of web analytics solution, like Omniture. And the Ciena web marketing team had to spend a great deal of time on special coding whenever there were any changes in the product pages to make sure the site search picked them up.

Ciena turned to us.

SLI worked with Ciena to implement both our Learning Search and Site Champion solutions to improve relevance of search results, as well as create pages optimized for search engines. Our services also easy integrate with analytics platforms like Omniture (and Google Analytics) to provide greater insight into visitor’s web behavior.

Ciena immediately saw results and a marked improvement in online visitor engagement. According to data from their Omniture analytics, in the second half of 2009, 18.5 percent of online visitors who used site search went on to download one or more files, compared to just 4 percent of visitors who entered the site via the home page, and who did not use site search.

In addition, Ciena’s site search results pages have become the number one entryway to the Ciena site. The company has tied 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations directly to these pages. And those registrations go straight into their sales lead funnel. You can read more about their deployment in the recent issue of Target Marketing magazine or via the case study on our site.

On the Internet, great customer service goes a long way toward increasing sales. A useable, easily searchable site is a key component. We are hard at work with our customers daily helping them ensure their site visitors become paying customers and not their competitor’s customers. Please contacts us if you would like to find out more.

Its Time to Prepare for Mobile Commerce

Posted by geoffbJune 8, 2010eCommerce, Site Search, Web Search4 comments

We recently conducted a survey of more than 400 e-commerce companies about their plans and activities in mobile commerce (m-commerce). The feedback was intriguing, to say the least. We found that while recent reports are pointing to significant growth in mobile subscriber numbers and an uptick in m-commerce, the majority of online retailers (80%) do not currently have a mobile commerce strategy in place. Yet, 83% of survey takers say between 1-10% of visitors come to their sites from mobile browsers and 12% cite that 11-20% get to their sites through the mobile web. As those numbers are expected to grow rapidly, we believe this represents a significant opportunity, and those of you that are preparing now for the influx of new business the mobile web represents stand to benefit.

The good news is, while many online retailers may be slow to adopt m-commerce, most recognize the opportunity and plan to address it in the near future. Fifty-six percent (56%) believe a mobile commerce strategy is very important or important to their overall business and 38% say it is important for driving sales. The majority (70%) plan to embark on an m-commerce strategy within the next two years. Only 38% believe m-commerce will be important or somewhat important to this year’s holiday campaigns, while 62% say it will not be important. It will be interesting to see the outcome this holiday season.

According to a recent post from Tim Parry of Chief Marketer, those that have yet to embark on a full-fledged m-commerce strategy may consider launching a mobile site now for research instead of focusing all of their efforts on sales. The thinking behind this is that it might help retailers determine the mobile usage patterns of their customers, so specific needs can be met as m-commerce strategies are expanded.

Other SLI m-commerce survey highlights include:

Seventy-nine percent (79%) say site search is important to a mobile website strategy and 61% are confident site search capabilities on a mobile site will generate additional conversions.
The top four features online retailers cite as the most important to enhancing the m-commerce experience are navigation (73%), site search (59%), product pages (54%) and product reviews (40%).
Of companies looking to build their m-commerce sites, 31% will utilize in-house resources, 28% will outsource the work to a third party developer, 36% will use a combination of both in-house and outsourced resources and the remainder are unsure.
Fifty-one percent (51%) of e-commerce companies do not consider the iPad to be a mobile device (they say iPad users can utilize their current website); yet 31% will direct iPad to their mobile site.
Only 22% of e-commerce organizations have developed shopping apps for platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry, while 49% are planning on creating apps, but don’t currently have one; and 29% are not planning on creating apps at all.

Thanks to all who participated in our survey. The full results will be made available on our site in the next few weeks. It will be interesting over the coming months to see how retailers respond to the growing m-commerce demand. We are already working with a number of you on adopting a successful m-commerce strategy, and look forward to helping others increase sales through the mobile web in the near future.

Visit us at IRCE – Booth #301

Posted by geoffbJune 7, 2010Conferences, eCommerce

We’ve all been busy this week getting ready for IRCE which starts tomorrow in Chicago – and it looks like this year’s event is going to be one of the best yet. Several of our customers and ecommerce technology partners will be there, and we’re looking forward to all that’s in store.

If you’re a retailer, be sure to stop by our booth #301 — we’ll be providing complimentary Site Search Evaluations where our team will look at your site and offer suggestions for how you can improve the site search to create a better user experience (and capture more conversions!).

We’re also holding a drawing for a Samsung 3D TV and 3D Blu-Ray Player – so be sure to drop by our booth and enter to win.

If you haven’t already registered for IRCE, we’re offering a $100 discount on registration fees. To receive the discount simply click here and enter discount code EC02220 and Booth #301.

We hope to see you there.

Congratulations to CenturyNovelty on 2nd Multichannel Merchant Award

Posted by geoffbMay 30, 2010eCommerce

We want to give a shout-out to our customer CenturyNovelty on picking up another Multichannel Merchant magazine award – marking its second year of winning in a row!

The MCM Awards are the top honors for B2B and B2C marketers; they recognize superior print catalogs and websites from around the globe. Gold and silver awards are given for quality in both print and Web, and the Cross Channel Award honors multichannel merchants for synergy across print and Web channels. The winners were selected from 51 print channel finalists and 21 Web channel finalists.

Some of the top brands in the country, like LL Bean (Catalog of the Year & Cross-channel Merchant of the Year), Orvis and Crutchfield were all winners. You can see the complete list here http://multichannelmerchant.com/news/ll-bean-musicians-friend-2010-mcm-awards/?cid=nl_mcm_weekly.

Congratulations to the CenturyNovelty team for their hard work and an award well-deserved!

Site Search and Web Analytics Put a Wealth of Data at Your Fingertips

Posted by Shaun RyanMay 25, 2010Analytics, Newsletter, Site Search1 comment

Most likely, you already know that with web analytics, you can uncover valuable information about how and where your visitors use your site to purchase products or download information. Did you also know that when you integrate analytics (like Google Analytics) with site search you can gain great insights into how your visitors think, how they navigate your site, and why they buy (or don’t buy)?

In fact, analytics packages show differences in how site search and non-site search users interact with your site. Typically, site search users are more engaged with the site – they spend more time browsing, view more pages, and convert at a much higher rate.

Specifically, analytics packages track and analyze site search data to give you a better understanding of which keywords convert well, and which keywords perform poorly. For example, site visitors might spell a keyword differently (a common problem for complex product names), or simply use a search term for a product you haven’t accounted for (e.g., “iPods” instead of “MP3 players”).

If the keywords don’t match, then valid products may not appear for that search term – resulting in poor conversions and/or click-throughs. Analytics can help you detect such keyword challenges early on, and allow you to modify product descriptions and other content and ideally capture more sales or requests to download information.

Integrating analytics with site search can also tip you off to seasonal trends so you can modify product copy or even add products as visitors’ search habits change. For example, you may discover through keyword analysis that shoppers are looking for back-to-school products earlier than you anticipated, or that they’re actively searching for a product you don’t carry that you might want to stock.

Analytics can also help improve your success rate when using site search results pages for pay-per-click campaigns. You can easily use site search results pages as PPC landing pages, giving you more time to spend on developing ad copy and bidding on keywords. Analytics will identify the ad variants that perform well, so you can optimize landing pages for campaigns with the best click-throughs.

Remember, when you’re using site search pages as PPC landing pages, the traffic patterns are going to be very different from when the pages are accessed from the site search box. In order to properly evaluate the site search effectiveness, as well as the effectiveness of the landing pages, they should be tracked separately in the web analytics tools.

While there’s a wealth of data to dig into when you connect analytics to site search, it can be overwhelming to sort through all the numbers. If you’re curious (or confused) about any information that you’ve gleaned from web analytics in relation to site search, contact your SLI customer success manager, and we’ll help you interpret the data.

Final Chapter on Site Search Tips

Posted by geoffbMay 24, 2010eCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips

This week we complete the series of site search tips taken from our “Big Book” free whitepaper (which you can still download at https://blog.sli-systems.com/whitepaper/bigbook). As we close out the series, we focus on “Search Page Format & Lay-out” with the following tips. If you’ve tried these or any tips we’ve shared over the past several weeks, please post a comment below and let us know what improvements in your site search performance you might have seen as a result.

Consider showing larger images when visitors mouse over a thumbnail image in the search results – This is particularly suitable for product searches. Normally on the product page there are large images that allow visitors to see the product detail closely. However, search results pages usually display smaller thumbnail images that are hard to see. By having a large image pop up when your customers mouse over the product listing, they can easily examine the detailed images for all the products shown on the results page without having to click into the product page repeatedly.

Show search suggestions on the search results page – These are search terms that are related to the term that has been entered and can give people additional ideas for what to search for. We normally counsel our clients to show search suggestions at the top of the page and the bottom of the page, and below each search result. According to our own research, about 25% of site visitors will click on a search suggestion.

Show video in your search results – More and more sites contain some video content. This content should easily be found in site search results and potentially played directly from the search results page. For example, onlinegolf.co.uk found that visitors who watch video are 85% more likely to buy. When they made the videos available in their site search, video viewership doubled.

Consider using AJAX to display your search page – By using AJAX, you avoid the need to do a page refresh after each refinement, reordering, view change, next page or subsequent search. A request is sent to the server in the background, and only the data that is required is sent to the browser. This results in a faster, snappier search experience.

Download the Big Book of Site Search Tips

Take our Mobile Commerce Survey

Posted by geoffbMay 20, 2010eCommerce, Site Search

If you’re involved in e-commerce, we’d like to invite you to participate in our latest survey pertaining to trends in mobile commerce. Even if you don’t have a mobile commerce site, or even plans for one, your feedback is valuable. We think the mobile platform will be a key area of focus for online retailers in the coming months – and in particular, we see mobile site search playing a crucial role. Everyone’s talking about mobile, but who’s really doing it?

We’re eager to see how many retailers have either embarked on – or plan to embark on – a mobile commerce strategy in the foreseeable future. Your information will remain confidential – and by taking the survey you’ll be entered to win a Flip video camera. To be entered in the drawing after you’ve taken the survey or to request the survey results, please email us at marketing@sli-systems.com.

The survey is about 10 questions and should take less than 5 minutes to complete. You can access it here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22ANCZJG3Q9.

Thanks for your help and participation!

Boost search engine findability by watching site search behavior

Posted by EdHoffmanMay 18, 2010Conferences, eCommerce, Site Search

Your website may have the hottest products on the market, and the most engaging content – but if the site doesn’t have “findability,” potential customers won’t even know you exist. They’ll go to Google or Bing (or other search engines) and search for products or information, and your site won’t turn up on the first page of results.

But if your findability has been fixed, your site will rank high in search, and conversion rates for visitors will improve. Today I’ll be talking more about the keys to findability at the Gilbane Content Management conference in San Francisco. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion titled “Findability – Crafting Your Site to Drive Traffic and Improve Conversions” with Sam Mefford of Avalon Consulting and Richard Zwicky of Enquisite, moderated by Hadley Reynolds of IDC.

One key to improving your site’s findability via organic and paid search is to take a close look at how your current site visitors search on the site, and the language they use. You can use their searching language to adapt your site content (such as product descriptions and keywords) to the way your customers interact. For instance, do people commonly misspell an important search term? If so, that misspelling needs to be built into your site search and your content. Do they often use a generic category term rather than the actual product name (e.g. “MP3 player” vs. “iPod”)? If yes, then you need to incorporate that generic term into your site content. Your customers’ search language can also be useful in identifying the keywords to utilize in SEO and paid search efforts.

Improving findability ties in with site visitors’ increasingly short attention spans when it comes to finding what they need. They spend their days browsing search engines and social networking sites and they have high expectations for being able to quickly track down what they need – and they’ll easily desert any site that doesn’t meet this requirement.

If you’re at the Gilbane conference today, please come check out our discussion – we’ll be speaking at 1:30pm as part of the Customers & Engagement track. And if you’re at the conference this Thursday, I’ll be speaking again as part of a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce – Raising the Bar for the User Experience.”

Convincing Customers to Purchase, No Matter Where They Are in the Buying Cycle

Posted by EdHoffmanMay 18, 2010eCommerce, User Experience

The race is on for websites to offer as engaging a customer experience as possible – through fast and relevant site search, multimedia content, customer reviews and other tactics designed to keep visitors on the site longer. Along with raising the bar on the customer experience comes the need to serve visitors early in the shopping process and keep their attention until they turn into serious shoppers who’ll actually buy.

Today, I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion on “Smarter e-Commerce” with Paul Sondregger of Endeca at the Gilbane Content Management Conference in San Francisco (Hadley Reynolds of IDC will be moderating). We’ll be discussing, among other things, how to engage buyers who have different intentions in terms of making a purchase on your site, depending on where they are in the buying cycle. For instance, someone who’s merely trying to gather information – if they’re shopping for an expensive product and need to know more before they commit to the purchase – needs to be impressed by the quality of information, and great customer service. This will encourage them to return when they’re ready to buy.

On the other hand, if visitors are ready to buy today, they’re much more likely to use site search, which means your site search feature needs to be fast and relevant if you want to convert that customer. And since we know that people convert at a higher rate when they use site search, it’s especially important that your site is designed in such a way that site search is rich and engaging and readily accessible.

If you’re attending the Gilbane conference, please stop by our session and discover more about what it takes to turn browsers into buyers. The session, “Smarter e-Commerce,” takes place at 3:30pm today as part of the Customers & Engagement track.

More on Refinements

Posted by geoffbMay 17, 2010eCommerce, Site Search, Site Search Tips

This week’s site search tips re-visit the topic of refinements. Refinements are an important aspect of site search because they make it significantly easier for visitors to sort through results to find what they’re looking for. We have many more tips on refinements (and other topics) in our free “Big Book of Site Search Tips” that can help you improve performance of your site search and deliver a better customer experience.

Next week will be our final post on the site search tips topic, so please be sure to download our free “Big Book” if you haven’t already!

Consider storing some facet choices for users so they don’t have to make them each time – For example, on a shoe website, if someone selects women’s shoes and size 5, this information could be stored in a cookie and automatically selected next time they do a search. This is implicitly remembering their preferences; you could also let them explicitly state these preferences. If you’re not sure, try asking your customers.

Consider having an advanced search page that allows the visitor to enter a keyword and preselect refinement options before they see results – Optionally, this can be configured as a gift finder. Consider configuring search so a visitor can only select combinations that actually return results. For example, you offer the option to refine products by color and by category. You offer a red iPod but no red TVs. So if visitors select the TV category, then the ability to restrict the search to red products should no longer be available.

Offer the ability to refine by price for a product search – Price is an important part of a buying decision. Normally price refinements are shown as a list of ranges. One nice option to consider is a price slider, which allows you to set a bottom price and a top price easily. This is a nice presentation option because it takes less screen real estate than a list of price ranges and it offers more flexibility than fixed price ranges. It does, however, require more clicks.