Great things are afoot
Here’s a podcast from Practical Ecommerce with one of our customers Mike Baranov from Footwear Etc. He is talking about the service we are providing for him, specifically our Learning Search and Learning Navigation.
SLI Blog
Cyber Monday
So how big was Cyber Monday? I took a look at the search traffic on a handful of our retail customers’ sites and compared their search traffic on Monday November 27 to their average search traffic for the 3 months before Thanksgiving. On average there were 90% more searches on Cyber Monday compared to the average, 70% more than on an average Monday.
Note: A couple of the customers showed no significant increase. One customer saw a 400% increase! The regular variation you can see here is the typical pattern of there being less activity during the weekend. But as you can see, the holiday season is well and truly upon us.
Alexa vs Search traffic
Lots of people criticize the reliability of the Alexa toolbar – see the comments on Matt Cutts’ blog or more recently from Om Malik. I would like to offer some qualified support for the Alexa toolbar – with some data to back it up.
At SLI we run the site search for lots of sites that have a wide range of Alexa rankings. Assuming that the number of site searches on a site is roughly proportional to it’s traffic we can use the site search data to test the accuracy of the Alexa data. This graph plots the Alexa rank against the number of site searches performed over a 30 day period for about 50 sites (randomly selected from our customers).
As you can see, there is a strong correlation between the Alexa rank and the number of searches that happen on a site, although there is a reasonable amount of variation.
We use the Alexa rank to get an order of magnitude estimation of the number of searches for a site, and it’s normally pretty good.
The assumption that number of searches performed on a site is proportional to traffic isn’t going to be always right. Some sites lend themselves to searching – particularly larger sites.
Some sites have completely unreliable Alexa rankings – particularly those that attract more (or less) people that have the Alexa tool bar installed. Case in point is the SEMPO web site. As others have pointed out, a higher proportion of search marketers have the Alexa toolbar installed. The SEMPO site has an Alexa ranking of 19521 (today) and had less than 5,000 searches over the last 30 days. This model would predict around 150,000.
I think Alexa is a useful service, providing that you use it carefully. I think there are a lot of people out there who have dismissed it as flawed and may be missing out on some valuable data.
Was this link useful?
Peter Da Vanzo spotted Google asking users if they found a link useful:
Note: It was only shown after he clicked on the result and then returned to the search results page.
This is similar to our free feedback tool that asks if the search results page was useful. The main difference is they’re asking about one search result rather than all of the results. We provide the feedback tool as one way of measuring search quality.
We normally assume that if someone returns to the search results page after a short time then they didn’t find the link useful and in our Learning Search we put less weight on those clicks. This type of survey could be a way of testing that assumption. I would expect Google would see the proportion of clicks on the Yes button rise as a function of the amount of time they spent at the link.
The customer is in control
I came across this interesting research by Lauren Freedman of the e-tailing Group: The Customer is in Control (note: you do need to sign up to access this but it is free).
This poll of 1300 consumers contains lots of useful information for retailers. The most relevant for us is that 83% of those polled considered keyword search very to most important when buying gifts online. This is yet more evidence that if you’re a retailer you just have to have good search.
Organizes-It
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last blog. I apologize to my regular readers, both of you.
Last week we announced another customer – Organize-It. Our team has really enjoyed working with Nick. We love having them as a customer.
Searching for search on Technorati
Stephan Spencer sent this through to me. You’ve got to laugh – a search for “Internal Search” on Technorati returns a Search Error :). It is working now – but it is amazing how useless the results are.
eTail Mid-Market
We’re exhibiting at eTail Mid-Market on Tuesday, Wednesday this week in San Francisco. We would love to see you if you can make it.
Google toolbar upgrade a little evil
I use the Google toolbar and I love it. The main thing I use it for is to easily search our intranet – using the feature that lets you add buttons to access any search you want.
Today the toolbar upgraded itself – which is OK. But what I thought was very aggressive (and a little evil) was that after it upgraded it showed this pop up
The pop-up stayed in front of the browser so you had to click the OK to make it go away. If you did just click the OK without reading the panel then it would change your default search to Google. Now I imagine a lot of people would just click OK and have their default changed.
I think if anything is going to be changing your defaults then you should be actively specifying it. I would expect this from some dodgy toolbar company – but not Goggle. The Daily Search Cast today shed some light in this… IE7 is released today and it comes with a search box that will send searches to your default search engine. What’s more Microsoft is going to upgrade everyone’s browser next month. If you haven’t changed your default then it will be Microsoft. So Google and the other search engines are trying to get your default search set to them.
This is probably a sign of things to come. When you go to Ask they ask you if you would like to change your default to them. I changed my default to our internal search – which makes it even easier for me. I still have the Google toolbar so I can search the web easily.
