3 Reasons Why Site-Search is Often Neglected as a CRO Tactic

The vast majority of eCommerce businesses miss the opportunity to drastically improve CR and AOV with more relevant site-search. But why?

A good rule of thumb to judge if your site-search needs improvement is if the exit rate on search result pages is close to or on par with your website's average bounce rate. Your search result pages should have some of the lowest exit rates on your site, since those searching have intent and often only exit search pages if results are irrelevant or no results were actually presented.

 

Another measure is your null-result rate (i.e. the percentage of total searches executed that return zero results). If that rate is above 5%, there is likely room for improvement.

Site-search is a critical customer touch point - an average of 30% of consumers use on-site search, but only 50% find what they're looking for (Econsultancy).

 

Visitors who buy are 91% more likely to use site-search than those merely browsing (Findwise).

4 out of 5 smartphone users use retailer apps. With 47% of them using retailer apps for product search (ComScore).

Users with successful site searches are nearly twice as likely to convert compared to those who don't search - since they are shopping with specific intent (Econsultancy).

3. Most eCommerce retailers believe they've done all they can to improve their site-search

It's incredibly common to hear eCommerce managers and marketers say:

"our text-matching search should find a match because we regularly tag all our products with synonyms and keywords"

or

"we know what's most important to our customers, so we sort our results according to what we know are top selling items"

or

"pushing high margin and sale items in search works fine, we see a lift when we manually insert our business logic into search".   

There are several problems with those statements. First, there are infinite ways and words your customers may use to describe your products. It's impossible, and arrogant, to assume one person or team can anticipate and tag all of them. And tagging products with synonyms rarely takes into account pluralisation and misspellings.

Secondly, are your top selling items top selling because they’re what visitors actually wish to buy or because you constantly push them to the top of results?

And lastly, is pushing high margin or sale items really in the best interest of your customers? Wouldn't it make more sense to try and help visitors find what they're looking for first, before pushing your business agenda? Maybe your agendas overlap, but you'll never know if you continue to manually manipulate a process that should be guided by consumer intent and relevance.

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This piece is part of a longer article entitled: Site-Search, the missing piece of the CRO Puzzle