Five Steps for Killer Site Search

About

Searchspring and a panel of Ecommerce experts dove into how to improve search on your Ecommerce site to maximize conversions and reach your goals for 2023. 

These days, expectations for immediate, relevant, and personalized experiences are high. Ecommerce is no exception. Shoppers want to find the products they want as quickly as possible – and they want to feel taken care of and understood in the process. Customers who use on-site search are even more demanding in their needs and expectations, but they are also more prepared to make a purchase. In fact, shoppers who use search are 8-10x more likely to purchase than shoppers who don’t. Make sure you are taking care of these customers by giving them the best experience possible. 

In the Five Steps for Killer Site Search webinar, we discuss who these high-intent shoppers are and how you can deliver the experience they want and expect in today’s digital world. Learn how to keep these shoppers on your site and keep them coming back for more with unique experiences created especially for them. Also, download the Five Steps for Killer Site Search ebook to build off of the webinar.

 

Enjoy the webinar!

 

0:00

Welcome to the Webinar, everybody.

0:02

Today, we’re going to be talking about five steps for killer site search.

0:08

So we all know about the importance of relevance and discovery in e-commerce, and that’s what we’re all about.

0:18

So my name is Jason Ferrara, I am the Chief Marketing Officer at Searchspring, and I’ll be the host of the webinar today.

0:28

I just want to talk quickly about shopper experience. You know, it’s search spring. We know how frustrating it can be to be a shopper and not find what you want.

0:38

Right, Shoppers’ hate that, they leave the site, but it’s equally as frustrating to be a merchant and not feel like you have the control to get the right product to the right person at the right time.

0:49

And that’s exactly what searchspring, helps you focus on getting the right product to the right person at the right time so that you can drive that ultimate shopper experience.

1:00

And that’s what we’ll be talking about today.

1:02

So I am excited to begin that conversation.

1:06

I’m excited to introduce our panelists.

1:11

So we’ve got four great panelists today, least Colleen, Matt, Nick.

1:18

I will have them introduce themselves, if you want to come on the screen there, Elise you’re first up. So why don’t you go ahead and give you a quick introduction of yourself.

1:27

Hi, everyone. Thank you, Jason. I am Elise Johnson and I’m a Customer Success Manager here at Searchspring. I’ve been Searchspring for about a year and have just so enjoyed being able to form some really solid teams with a lot of my peers, and it’s been a wonderful experience. So looking forward to passing on some of those best practices to you guys today.

1:44

Great, thanks, Elise. And we’ll just go in the order that you guys are on my screen. So Matt, take it away.

1:51

Everyone Matt Jarman, strategic sales manager.

1:54

I work with our new prospective customers working on finding a fit for their solutions. Been in e-commerce for about five years when it searchspring for a year and a half.

2:08

Nick, you’re next, sir. My name is Nick Kuhne, and I’m director of product here, which means that I lead our product and engineering teams to develop the future of searchspring.

2:19

Excellent, and Colleen.

2:21

Howdy, folks. I’m Colleen. I am the Customer Success Team lead here at Searchspring.

2:27

I’ve been with the company for about three years, and super passionate about helping customers achieve their goals, so stoked to help pass along some of that knowledge today.

2:37

All right. Thanks, everybody, for those introductions. two more things before we get started.

2:41

one is behind the scenes is our Producer Charle Summers.

2:46

You won’t see him, but you may hear me ask him a question or two during the, during the webinar. So don’t wonder if I have gone crazy. Charles is actually back there moving slides for us So thank you for that.

2:57

And also if you have questions at anytime during the webinar there is a questions queue in the goto Webinar sidebar.

3:06

Feel free to type a question in there, I’ll see it. Charles will see it.

3:10

The panelists will see it.

3:11

We can facilitate the question and answer. So please feel free to put your questions in the in the queue.

3:18

All right, so today’s agenda is pretty simple.

3:21

We’re going to do two poll questions. It helps us, as panelists, get a better understanding of you all in the audience, and from where your head is, and where your efforts lie in your businesses, and then we will touch on those polls.

3:36

And some answers just for a few minutes with the panelists, and then we’ll jump into the presentation really focused on optimizing site search, and, like we say, you know, really drive and that killer site search. So, and then, and then we’ll leave time for Q and A We’ll either ask and answer in line, or we will. Joke, that’s the agenda. Pretty simple stuff.

3:58

Charles, They heard me talk about you. So, why don’t you move us forward to the first poll question here for everybody.

4:04

Little audience participation, how much time do you spend on site search?

4:10

that, a quarter of your time, half your time, three quarters, your time, Do you have a dedicated resource, or not enough?

4:18

How do you feel about the amount of time you spend?

4:22

It’s always fun to see the voting happen in real time here.

4:30

I think the results are almost in Charles’, were just slowing down just a little bit, and I think we’re probably good right there? There we go. All right, so. About a quarter of the time, and not enough. Alright, well.

4:47

You’ve come to the right place if it’s if it’s not enough. And frankly, if you are working on it.

4:53

Know, if you have a dedicated resource or you’re working on it more than more than that. I think this is about optimization as well. And that’ll help you. But certainly not enough as it is a great answer and secretly what we’re looking for so so that we can address some of those issues. So, thanks for that. Are really, really appreciate that. Next poll question here.

5:13

Charles. What topic are you most interested in learning about today?

5:18

zero search results, search relevancy, autocomplete, the control over merchandising or personalized search.

5:31

And, again, answers coming in. Very good to see here.

5:42

And we’re just starting to slow down a little bit with results.

5:48

Right there, Charles’s.

5:49

I think we’re, we’ve, we’ve kept out, alright, good.

5:52

You know, what’s nice about this, that I see is a little bit of everything, right?

5:57

And that’s great, because these topics are important and they’re important for or optimizing search. So, I really do appreciate your participation.

6:07

What I’d love to do now is jump to the panel quickly, know, that the answer to the first question overwhelmingly was, I don’t spend enough time on site search.

6:19

Uh, not not to make it too much of a softball, but is that surprising to anybody, is that, And what do we do about it? Yeah. Matt, you’re shaking your head. What do you, what do you think?

6:30

It’s not surprising because it takes a lot of time. The tools usually aren’t there.

6:35

You don’t have the resources, it’s buggy, it’s glitchy, it’s not fun, and it’s not not focus.

6:45

Yeah. All right, Jason, and how do you go about it? If you don’t have the reporting and the insights along with it to kind of drive that process, it’s kind of left to or where do I start? So it can be a little overwhelming as well. So we we definitely come across that quite a bit.

7:06

Beliefs, you had talked about working with working with clients, like, what are some of the Give us some, give us some of the words that your your, your clients are using when they talk about site search?

7:16

The beautiful thing about us is that we have such a wide range of clients. So I have some teams that are truly just one person merchandising and then some, where you’ve got a team of 10. So I think, in, regardless of that, I mean, you all have only so much time with you today. So for me, is really kind of understanding exactly what we’re dealing with when it comes to eat or merchandising team. And then finding the things we can prioritize. We’ll talk about a few things today that, I mean, you can add in if you’ve got 30 additional minutes and your week. That we can kind of, you know, kind of lists out the top tools for us, whether it’s mitigating zero results are adding and product recommendation. It’s, it really is focused on that on that client, but there are just kind of, I think, all around why tools that we can really, really AMP up pretty quickly to help you out.

8:00

Great, thanks. And, Nick, anything you want to add?

8:04

Yeah, I think I just wanted to say, you know, for those who are looking to spend more time when they send their site search, I like to think about this problem a lot is like a, sort of like an iceberg, right. Where you have, you know, clearly, shopper is going on and just searching for something, but the amount of research and, you know, work that goes in from a merchandiser to make that experience really connect with that shopper is something we love to be able to provide. So I’m interested in talking about that today.

8:33

Yeah, a couple of things I want to call out.

8:35

one is, Matt, you had said, it’s not fun. It doesn’t seem fun for people to work on optimized site search.

8:45

And then, I think, you know, Elise between Human Coleen definitely heard, people aren’t making the time to do it. And that’s not surprising, right? If something’s not fun, I don’t make the time to do it.

8:56

So, you know, that’s, how do we, how do you block out that time on your calendar? Or how can we make it fun and interesting to you?

9:03

And, Nick, I think that goes to your point, like, if we think about this as a mountain of stuff, it’s, it’s hard. It’s hard to climb about, right? So, how do we do it in, in smaller chunks?

9:13

I think those are really, really important points.

9:16

And, at least, to your point, one person or a team of people, right, if it’s something that we’re looking at, that isn’t thrilling us or it’s hard and we don’t have tools, or the perception is that it’s difficult, it’s going to be a challenge for us to do. So let’s start breaking through some of that.

9:30

now, Elise, we’ll start with you and then we’ll talk about zero results searches. So, I think, you know, why don’t, why don’t you go through it and talk a little bit about this.

9:43

Interesting to me is first, can you just help me define what that is?

9:47

So we all are on the same page in terms of what that means, and then, and then help us understand, you know, how search for it can help there?

9:54

Yeah, absolutely. So as your result search, these are dreaded by many. But it is when an shoppers coming to your site in entering a term into the search bar that is yielding.

10:05

And so, you know, we know how valuable shoppers that are using search are to the site. I mean, they know exactly what they want, to have a higher chance of converting at the end of the day. And so, when we take away the ability for them to have results by hitting a new results page, A good chunk of those, shoppers are those shoppers, I think it’s about 17% will leave the site completely to look for something else, and never come back. So super valuable section of your site to kind of have control over. So that’s what that’s going to be truly just for hitting a new results page. And we’ve got a good amount of tools that we can utilize within Search Spring to combat those. And so, what kinda walk through the process of, as I’m talking with some of my customers, here’s the kind of places that we’re covering, so I’m happy to go ahead and share search ranking.

10:49

what we have access to within that grid.

10:53

Sounds good, thanks!

10:55

I don’t know if I have control over the screen share, yet, though.

10:59

Awesome, there we go, OK, perfect, OK.

11:03

You all see my screen?

11:07

Looks good.

11:08

Perfect, The majority of our conversations runs your results. Start with is your result reports, and this is really beautiful because it is telling you exactly what your shoppers have. searched for. We can go up here and say, hey, you know, we wanna look at the last 30 days and this is going to show you exactly what your shoppers are searching for on the site better yielding results. And so I will say right off the bat, before, we even, we even get a no result. There are a few things that we’re doing to mitigate those right off the bat. And that’s typically you know, you’ve got spell correction coming into play, the autocomplete box suggestions, which Colleen is going to get into in a bit, but so that’s coming into play first.

11:42

But when we do have the scenario where his ears little pops up, will go to this report, and we’ll kind of talk through it. So there’s a couple of preventative things that we can do. We have the ability to create synonyms and then redirects as well, and what the synonyms are going to look like let’s just utilize this, and I will say this is our demo account. So the searches are gonna look a little bit I just because we’re coming in here and testing things well. Let’s say we’re seeing this Jimmy product and we know we have a product that We’re calling Johnny.

12:06

So we are pretty sure that people are looking for Johnny when we’re seeing Jimmy and what we can do is, OK, How can we tie this word to the right variation about word and that’s typically done through So what we’re seeing there is, regardless of whether someone’s searching for Jimmy or Johnny, we’re going to tie those two terms together. So, there will be results that populate, regardless of what that will that will help mitigate, or results, such as and then a redirect, as well. So, if we can send the shop, or to a Direct Product Detail page, or a particular category, that’s another way for us to keep them from getting that.

12:39

And I will say there’s a couple of times where you just can’t tie it to you a set of results. It may be that we don’t care a dot product at all. Or we’re out of sof, whether it’s temporarily, or discontinued it. In that scenario, we actually were able to go into our Merchandising Suite. I want you guys to do that whole process of doing right now, but you can actually build out an individual campaign around that, no result word. And so instead of us just redirecting the shop or to you know, similar items, we can actually build our full campaign where you’re manually adding in those similar items.

13:12

The page, full level of additional communication, you can put on that page within our content. So we could say, hey, shopper suit, you’re searching for Jenny, don’t have this product any longer, but in the meantime, you can browse similar items below. So there are a lot of the conversations that we’re having around mitigates Arizona reports in this. And this report really gives us some, some great insights on on the right actions to take from there.

13:40

Great, a couple of thoughts, Elise come to mind when we’re looking at this, so one is the opportunity to maybe use this for research on the products that we do offer or products that we should be offering.

13:53

Do you have that conversation with clients door? And again, if it’s something that we’re seeing, like let’s say we sell shoes and we’re seeing Nike on through a lot, we don’t carry nine feet. That might be something that we need to go back to the product team and say, hey, you’ve got 100 searches for this. In the past 30 days, maybe we should construct. That’s so great thing for you to share your product team, as well.

14:14

And in terms of synonyms, you know, that’s a, that’s a, a simple concept, because I think we understand what is the meaning of, the word synonym isn’t always easy to come up with those words. Is it, Is it as simple as, it sounds? It’s ours, or it didn’t trick to it. Are you particularly good at it, Or it? is that, Can everybody be good at that?

14:37

Well, and this is where you know your product do that better than So I think, I tend to see that my, my customers have a pretty good feel for, Hey, we know what they’re searching for with this. Whether it’s just so you know, classic brand misspelling, or if it’s, you know, we sell genes and we call all of our, all of our genes denim but was searching for genes, we can tie those words together to make sure that the result sets are or what they should be shoppers. And, again, at the end of the day, most relevant. So it is definitely something that we’ll talk through, and that’s where you can lean on your customer success manager as well.

15:10

Sounds great.

15:10

And, and I think the notion that, a zero result doesn’t have to be a dead end, right? You can, you can actually serve something up, if you still have a zero result.

15:23

When, when we’re talking about easy things to add into your schedule. I will ask people to take maybe 10 minutes on a Monday and just try and look at the past seven days, is the result searches. And just those top five, is there something we can do these top five. I think you can just add in 10 minutes. And again, at the end of the day, this is giving our Shoppers Attunes to convert where they did not happen before.

15:42

So you’re gonna see, you’re gonna see those rates go up, total transactions go up. So it is a really powerful thing, but really doesn’t take too long for you to add into your schedule.

15:53

Yeah, great, OK, so while while you’re answering my question, A question came in from the audience.

15:59

So, Ken has asked, so the search terms that you’re looking at in that report, are those search terms coming from Google being passed through to Searchspring or those terms what people are actually searching for on the merchant’s site.

16:16

There, what people are actually entering into the search bar? Yes. So we are tracking those, and we can tell my guys are heading in there.

16:26

All right, That sounds great. We’ve got another question here coming in.

16:32

So, Chris has asked the zero results result searches report, can we add query replacement?

16:41

You cannot directly from the report, but I will say there is a whole site customizations portion within search screen. And it’s quickly found within that. You do have the ability to add in a career placement as well, if that makes the most sense for that scenario. And sometimes it’s a, you know, we have the debate, should it be on an MRI or replacement? And so we’ll kind of walk through those. And the beautiful thing about this, is that it’s kind of a living document in some ways, right. So we’re constantly updating and rethinking how we are, how we’re setting things up. But Yes, so To answer your question, you can add a query replacement just not from the report directly.

17:12

Great. Thank you. And yeah, that concept of living document, Right. This isn’t a set it, and forget it thing, it’s something that you need to review, and need to think about. Over, and over, and over. Right.

17:22

And I talk about this constantly with my clients again, because it is such a powerful thing that you have total control over. And, again, doesn’t take much time. It’s really nice.

17:29

Easy tool to add in here.

17:32

Yeah. We’ll talk about those frequently. Accounts. Sorry, You’ve heard this speech 10 million times, so pretty.

17:39

Yeah, that’s good. It’s good. It’s a good reminder, right, It’s a good reminder that that’s important. Alright, let’s go to, to step two. I think this is a, least, are covering this two, which is improve search relevancy.

17:51

So why don’t you just tell us a little bit about, like, what do you mean, search relevancy? And then I’m gonna walk us through that.

17:58

Yeah, So, at the end of the day, we’re talking about alleviating frustrations that shoppers were seeing on the site. Right, that makes it not fun to shop. We want it to be very smooth, great user experience.

18:07

And a lot of the pain that comes with utilizing search on the site is irrelevant search results. So we have a couple of different ways that we can make sure that we are providing the most relevant results to what a shopper searching for. And at the very root of that work, we know that shoppers are searching how they talk about a product, right? So as we are looking at, what are the most relevant matches that we have to how someone searched for a particular term, is one by, how are they talking about it? And so I can kind of showcase. We have a beautiful tool within the Management Console called Search Preview, and that basically allows us to see, go ahead and jump from zero results to this.

18:44

And that essentially allows us to see what’s an unsolved version of the front end. So you should see everything as it appears on the live site, but it allows us to really understand why things are appearing, where they are within the search results. The classic example of this is the different search between a shirt, dress and then address, that can yield. Like, we know what the Shoppers intention is that those different searches, but, they’re so similar and they, I mean, they have the same words, so there’s a lot of times where it could just, kind of, you know, results in a jumble of things that are semi close to what we’re, what we’re shooting for. So we’ll kind of go ahead and utilize the shirt drastically.

19:20

Here.

19:22

And so, you can see that we have essentially a matching, it’s a logic behind how we are scoring these individual products, and they will say, just right off the bat, we have to find the words that the shopper searched. So shirt and dress somewhere within the product, data in order to risk may not result. So we’re finding these two words, within 320 results, but how do we showcase what’s right? And so we have a matching system, scoring logic in the background running, and they’re heavily than most heavily weighted, or a portion of this is going to be the subject. And so, we’ll look at the search, and we’re saying, OK, we know if someone is searching for a shirt dress. Again, that’s how they’re talking about that item. So we’re going to use dress as the subject for the Search, and we will typically derive what we’re matching against with the product name. So here, we can see that we’re finding dress in that same loss position, the subject of the search, and we’re also finding shirts. So we know that that’s going to be best match to what the shopper was searching for. And you’ll see that in some of these top results, right? We’re getting a full match for these products.

20:20

Because the power finding, the words in the product data here. Now, if you scroll down just a little bit, we hit that product number. Now, we can see it’s got a lower match because it’s just addressed, we’re not seeing that shirt dress combination here. And we actually, what will typically do, especially when I’m going to call it the customers, will jump into this new details section, and that’s going to tell you exactly where we’re finding these words in the product data. So we can see that for her dress, for returning it, in the title, it’s in the product name, in the how to cover, we’re bringing certain here, which is not relevant to that product, or really what the shopper search for it.

20:53

Because we are, we are looking at the description, this will kind of lead into a conversation of, OK, we have the descriptions that it’s really good for the shopper, when they’re on the product detail page, right, they’re looking for a full description of what the item is. Why do we want search in, which tends to be moving the paragraph about the product? Would we want that to be set as searchable when we’re coming to the product, data results to return? So we might, it’s nice, because you have the control to say, maybe we should turn off the description from being searched and the product data, because, hey, we can tell for us, it’s going to yield some, maybe irrelevant results. So we do have total control over that here as well. But again, you can see as you scroll down, and you’ve got things that have lower matches, and you can always utilize that you detail section to figure out exactly exactly, why exactly. Remember finding those terms in the data.

21:39

So that’s going to be kind of how we’re breaking down why things are returning, where they’re returning the results.

21:47

Yeah.

21:48

So, thinking through the product data, D, who have, what are the conversations you have around how the product data set up, how things are spelled, how the database and structured like, do you get into those conversations about, about the underlying data?

22:07

Absolutely. Absolutely, and we will always say that, you know, again, keeping in mind that shoppers are searching for things. How they talk. So we, when we’re naming a product, we want to think, OK, how is someone going to be searching for this? How are they talking about it, just in everyday life? But then it gets into is your data set up in a consistent way where we can make sure that we’re matching consistently based on the terminology that the shoppers utilizing. And so will always say inconsistently bad. and consistently good data is much worse than consistently bad data. Because we can take that consistently by Zeta and kind of re shape it a little bit on the backend to best match and kind of created a separate product typing to match against shoppers searching for it. But, yeah, we talk about that all the time, to make sure that your data is laid out in a very usable, realistic way based on how the software might be searching for it.

22:58

Yeah, I would imagine that might feel a little daunting, right? I have to look at my whole product catalog, and figure out how to optimize that, but, but, it’s an important part of it for Search relevancy, right, And it’s important to remember that, that is why you have us, right. That’s why you have your Customer Success Manager. That’s why we have a phenomenal support team that walks through that kind of stuff. Should we need to convince that? I mean, I will say there are very, very few times where we’re having to completely how do we need to redesign the data conversation in there.

23:26

Wonderful scenarios where we can work with, you know, what we have and make sure that we are, you know, arranging things in a way that are going to ultimately at the end of the day, provide the most relevant searches.

23:40

Excellent. Thanks.

23:41

You know, you, you brought up something that I, I I try to link these conversations to my day job, which is not as A webinar host, but as a professional marketer.

23:51

And, you know, you said something that I think is really important, which is, people are going to search the way that they speak, right there. They think a word or they say, oh, and that’s what they, that’s what they speak. And that relevancy is so important. And I just, I connect that to my day job all the time, and we tried to communicate in the language of real people.

24:10

So that you increase understanding and relevancy, and we know really great partners.

24:17

Great care of them, right? When we’re making sure that we have the site set up in a way that makes the most sense with shopping. So so crucial.

24:25

Yes, Yeah.

24:27

Great.

24:27

Had a question come in that is, will we send the recording of this out? and yes, absolutely. We will.

24:34

So that we’ll have this so you can take a look at that after work. Great. All right, Elise, thank you so much.

24:41

I think we’re going to bring Colleen out of the stage here and talk about speeding up searches with autocomplete.

24:51

Amazing.

24:53

The stage is yours, and I’m happy to be present. And talking about the autocomplete, Right?

25:00

Which no, It’s one of the most powerful tools an e-commerce site can implement. Is that well powered autocomplete, because when this is present and powered correctly, it can help shoppers find what they’re looking for quicker, which translates to faster sales. And that ultimately, is the name of the game, right? How can we further support the buying decision? How can we help shoppers find what they’re looking for quicker, which ultimately increases AOV, increases conversion, increases the bottom line red. So let’s let’s break it down a little bit.

25:37

Autocomplete.

25:38

What do I mean?

25:40

I mean, when a shopper clicks into the search bar and begins to type their search query, that box that opens up, right?

25:47

And we want a visually appealing experience and relevant products to be shown to support that buying decision. And it can actually speed it up, right? Because this visual experience, they’re able to see a snapshot of the listing page before they ever have to go there.

26:04

So visually, we want it to be crisp and clean. We don’t want to clutter. We don’t want to offer too much information here which may distract the shopper for making a buying decision. You know, I mean, that’s opposite game. That’s not what we want to do there at all.

26:21

So, crisp and clean, Then, relevant information must be shown here from popular search suggestions to filters and suggested products, right?

26:32

And so, at least use the example of shirt dress versus dress shirt. I’ll keep with that because it’s a powerful one, Same terms flipped. We’re gonna want the autocomplete to keep up with that and show shirt dresses, overdressed shirts to make sure that we’re showcasing exactly what the customer is looking for.

26:53

So this is the perfect opportunity to share my screen and kind of show you what I mean.

26:58

Right here at search ring, you know we can work with both custom designs, but we also have a tried and true out of the box solution.

27:08

Um, sorry, I just cleared my screen on my end a little bit.

27:13

And so I can come here and I can actually type in shirt tress.

27:19

And so the first thing that shows up here is these popular, suggested terms. And this is powerful because it’s gonna give you what you’re searching for, but it’s also going to give you some other terms, basically, saying, Hey, when people, based on all of the data science, when people search for shirt dress, they may also be looking for these other terms. So if they’re not finding what they’re looking for with their search, you’ve got some additional queries there that we’re offering to help support that buying decision.

27:47

The other thing that happens here is it’s listing filters, and these are interactive, right?

27:52

So if I now I’m looking for a pink shirt dress, I can hover and it’s going to show me that or white, right.

28:00

Or if I’m looking at a specific category, or if I want a specific brand, for instance, and this is all very site specific and can be altered based on the site.

28:09

So from there, we also show 4 to 6 relevant products and this would be indicative of the most relevant products that are you that you’re gonna see on the listing page. And so now I can say, heck yes, this is what I want.

28:23

I can click on it directly from the autocomplete, takes me to the product detail page where I’m bypassing that listing page where I can get caught up and searching And scrolling you know, a specific type of shopper would be the infinite scroller and we don’t want to get into that game can bypass all that.

28:42

Now I can add to cart and buy directly from here.

28:45

So this is really all contextualized around relevancy scoring, baked in spell correction, using the right filters, showcasing the right products, and basically just ensuring we’re properly supporting and even speeding up that buying decision.

29:04

Great, Thanks. So, a couple of, a couple of questions for you.

29:10

Again, I want to just talk briefly about the underlying data. So, you had talked about the three most popular that our technology thinks you’re probably talking about and then how does all the other data fit together that, filter, the pictures, all the things that you just showed there? In that example, Are we arrange all that underlying data?

29:30

Yeah, so we’re basically taking a snapshot right of the listing page, and there’s different ways within the platform that you can set this up.

29:37

So within site customizations, you have an entire portion dedicated to your filters where you’re able to say, these are my top five and there’s even reporting around filters where it says, hey, when somebody comes to your site, These are the most utilized filters, and you can re-order your top 4 to 5 filters based on that, knowledge, that data.

29:58

And then that’s what’s going to show up in the autocomplete.

30:00

So, if we know that primarily when folks go to your site, they’re filtering by, color, brand, and category, and you can make sure that those are and the correct order and therefore showcased within the autocomplete.

30:15

And Elise talked on the relevancy, right, and what products show up first based on that relevancy scoring? That’s exactly the snapshot you’re seeing in the autocomplete. And if you don’t like what you see, you can We can rework the data. We can create a merchandising campaign where we’re pinning certain products in play.

30:34

Just to say, like, I know that these are my top sellers, and I want to make sure that when somebody is searching for X, that they see these products. So, you do have full control over ultimately what is shown within that little popup window, so super powerful.

30:53

Yeah. Excellent. Thank you. And then, a question came in from the audience around doing these things with Shopify, so we’ve able to use this with Shopify and other platforms.

31:06

Oh, yeah. All of our platforms.

31:07

So this is comes. The autocomplete comes with even our basic platform. If you’re only using search, you get site search and autocomplete. So unless someone tells us otherwise, Hey, we want this custom design, we want it to look the specific way. It’s, it’s ultimately going to look like what I showed you.

31:30

Excellent.

31:31

Well, thanks, Kelly. That was great.

31:34

Absolutely. All right.

31:36

I think that Matt is, is waiting in the wings there. And there he is. He’s not even waiting anymore.

31:42

There We are good to see a map.

31:44

We’re going to talk about, hence, or, Hey, we’re going to talk about Merchandising.

31:50

We we’ve used the term control a few times. This concept of, you know, showing exactly what we want to show.

31:57

So, walk us through that, and help us understand that, that control.

32:01

And what we really want to be doing, is, as Merchandisers, for sure. Small disclaimer. I have my year and a half year old daughter, if she gives us a yell, She’s extremely passionate about site search, so just want everyone to know. But, so, again, you’re right.

32:16

Reason, are actually love site search. Again, I’m in sales, so I talk with our prospective customers, people who come in with a problem, and see if we are fit. So, I’m talking from kind of what Lisa alluded to. All ranges of E-comm Teams from the Manager co-ordinator Role, Associate Role of Demand to a director role, DP rho and G Suite owner, founder, single person team. So a lot of different people that I talk to, and when I bring up the word Merchandising, it’s not often receive merchandise. I don’t really know what that is, and it’s the arrangement or assortment of products.

32:47

So we’ll get into that, but And so I’m like, how do you arrange your products on landing pages, OK. We do that a little bit, and that focus is typically on a category page, or collection page, or a sale page, and not really similar to the poll results, not really focused on Search specifically.

33:04

So when we dig into Search, and it’s like, OK, let’s talk about Search merchandising. What does the focus? Well, we have a tool. We do it natively, or we didn’t really do it at all. We don’t really know how.

33:14

It takes a lot of time.

33:15

It’s buggy, it’s glitchy, we don’t do it.

33:18

And so for example, maybe I’m talking to talk to somebody if an energy, maybe I’m talking to a boutique or a fashion apparel and clothing company and let’s take the dress shirt example. We just do a quick site audit, are starting to address. Or maybe the products are irrelevant, so police hit on that. Maybe. I’m seeing some dress shirts and pants and some leggings and some yesterday. I saw some candles OK, That’s fine.

33:41

That can be fixed and tweaked to the relevancy. Maybe they’re 100% relevant. So, I search for dress shirt, and I’m getting a lot of button downs in the first 40 products or button downs and it’s perfect relevancy.

33:51

Then, I would dig into, OK, cool, You got relevant products. Is this how you want the products arranged or these the first five dress shirts? You want to show these, the gesture that you want to show above the fold. Or, before I have to scroll on the page. And, a lot of times, the answer is, No, these aren’t our most profitable products. These aren’t our most highly reviewed products, that these aren’t our most purchased products. These are just, you’ll see the sort by relevance.

34:16

That doesn’t really mean anything because all the dress shirts irrelevant, if I’m searching for a dress shirt.

34:20

And so, when Search is Accounting for 10, 15, 20 percent of your bottom line e-commerce revenue kinda blows my mind. And, so, of course, it’s to talk to manual, there’s no way to do it, and so there are a lot of ways to take control, total control, or merchandise your search results, and so, I’ll share my screen here.

34:43

Bina.

34:46

Thank you.

34:51

See this here? Cool. So there are a few different ways to merchandise the site, so I’m going to talk about 2.

34:56

1 is going to be Global Merchandising one’s going to be keyword, or query specific merchandising, so going into the backend tier, Yep. We love site search.

35:05

Thinking about Global Merchandising, this is more your automated merchandising. It’s evergreen, you’re not really touching it often. This is our general business logic that we care about. This is important, and impactful for everybody, but even more impactful for the small team, the Lean team, the one person show, one man band, one woman show, whatever it may be. And so thinking about Global Merchandising, this would apply to every single search result that anybody could ever get. So, again, general business logic, we would first look at boosting rules. These are gonna be based on your data points. So whether you’re on a Shopify, Magento custom platform, you’re feeding us the data. This would be your data. So we have fake data here and so let’s take the boutique example. Generally, as a fashion and apparel business, I care about XYZ.

35:47

First thing is typically going to be stock status. This could be in stock, yes or no. This could be percentage of stock. This could be percentage of variance in the stock. Again, it’s based on what you’re feeding us. Let’s just say for the sake of the example, we want to boost products that are in stock. So I search for shirt Searchspring returns 100 relevant products. 50 of them are in stock. Those 50 boost, those at the top 50, the other 50 or demoted or buried, because they’re not in stock or they’re hidden from the page, if you prefer that.

36:12

From there, typically fashion and in parallel, we care about newness of a product. So let’s say sacrifice feeding stations, Published decent, created, new to us as a business, is less than 30 days old.

36:23

Same example, those 50 in stock shirts, only 20 of them are less than a month old. Those are gonna be the first 20 that we see, Maybe a last rule we care about. We have a tag seasonal and boosting our winter products right now, so of those 2010 of them are winter. Those are gonna be the first 10 that appear. The next set are not Winter products, but they are in stock. And they are new. The last set will be in. stock in. The final set will be out of stock. So it’ll be a hierarchy here where we’re not touching this often. It’s we have in stock newness and winter.

36:53

Maybe we change it four times a year for the changing of the season and how we would maybe sort those from high to low. So we have 10 products that fit all those rules. Let’s sort of high to low based on sales data. Google Analytics revenue or units sold. So, that’s the general, maybe we want to schedule that campaign out. We have four times will change it a year.

37:10

So, we’re gonna run that from today until whenever spring starts, I don’t know, in February or something like that, Whenever spring starts, and then, we’re going to schedule out our spring campaign, and we don’t touch this again. And maybe we would also want to inject some banners here.

37:23

So when someone searches for shirt, we have some winter look books and we’re going to inject the banner no development needed here, position three marketing Census, The URL. Boom, There it is. So, that’s global. That’s statewide, It’s automated, we’re not touching, it took off.

37:37

From there, maybe we care about specific search query merchandising similar to how we care about specific collection merchandising. And so, we would jump into our search insights, or reporting to say, all right, let’s look at the last week, 30 days, month, quarter, and figure out what’s the actual impact of site search. OK, we can see, in this test data, very clearly that when people search Black Dress, it’s the highest percentage of our revenue. It’s brought in 71 grand over the last month.

38:03

And you can see that maybe we focus on the top 10 or 25 queries only.

38:08

And we treat these like collections because they’re high impacts or revenue. When people search for black dresses, it’s brought in certainly one brand. We want to create a campaign, a baby piece.

38:19

We want to create a campaign that says, When people search for black dress, we want to have now total control over what they see on the site.

38:25

We want to pin certain products, so we can drag and drop. We can double click. These four products will now always be pinned at the top when someone searches for black dress, because we know something about the business that we want to push these products.

38:36

Maybe they’re, we want to push out the stock, or maybe there are hot sellers, and then, from there, anything could apply.

38:42

So, maybe we’re running a for Variation AB test that says, and we’re going to run that from today until into the month, Variation A has been products. Variation B, we’re using different rules, variations, see, we’re testing out some different banners, and look books and content, marketing collateral.

38:57

Then finally, we’re testing out personalization, which I’ll let Nick talk about here in a second. But we want to test that out as well, and we’re gonna run that in search String will tell us what’s actually working for the highest percentage impact of our search, which is impacting 25% of our bottom line as a whole.

39:13

Matt, who, who, in the business is usually doing what you’re doing, and then who in the business is consuming this information.

39:24

It could be any, Anybody depending on the industry, right? If it’s, let’s say, we’re a Lean team, we have seven people total in the business, and we have somebody with a marketing function, title that run really runs marketing, and the website and data, and a lot of different things.

39:39

Maybe that person is in here, once a month, you’re hopping on a call once a month with an account manager, to talk through what we’re actually doing, some of the analytics best practices, upcoming promotions. Maybe there is a dedicated resource, and that may be an e-commerce manager or Director merchandising that’s in here constantly daily, or a few times a week. And that’s going to be dependent on industry, too, right.

40:01

Maybe that is, the e-comm manager and fast fashion. That’s changing promotion all the time.

40:06

Very different than, you know, a three person team and an automotive company who They just set up a global merchandising and that’s really it.

40:15

Great, OK, Good. And, you know, the other thing that I think about merchandising all the time.

40:20

And I believe we take it for granted a little bit, because in our normal, everyday as real human being shopping experiences, we go to the websites we buy from, or we walk into, no, a store.

40:35

And things are merchandized for us, and we may or may not think about the, the ability of somebody to do that.

40:42

So it’s, it’s, it’s something that needs to have, you need to have the control over it.

40:47

Oftentimes you just don’t, right? It’s usually impactful.

40:51

I always bring up the brick and mortar experience, I put in the signs here, the new items in the front and the sale items in the back, Exact same thing with your search experience in your website.

41:00

Yep. Yep.

41:01

Great, thanks, Matt. Really appreciate that.

41:05

And, Nick, you’re up next, we’re going to bring you onto the stage here to talk about personalization.

41:14

Yes, for sure. Excellent.

41:17

So let’s maybe, maybe start with, like, defining personalization. I mean, it, and that may seem a little simple, but I guarantee we all have talk about it just a little bit differently.

41:28

So it’d be nice to hear from you.

41:31

Yeah, for sure. So for us, personalization is including all relevant items that a shopper has told you on their site as part of creating an experience for that shopper. And so really, I look at it as they give us information about what types of things that they want to see, and we give them that back as a as a, you know, personalized experience for them.

41:59

So, before I jump into demo, I’ll just talk a little bit about what, what our feature, here, we have this, which is personalized searching category.

42:06

So I’ll say it in a couple of different ways. Personalized searching category enhances Our Search relevancy, some of the things, at least, was showing you earlier, by taking advantage of a shoppers, on-site behavior, to help determine the category, and search worrying. Once I wouldn’t say, Sort of view a category, are looking at a search result.

42:24

Said Another way, Personalized search in category uses our personalization engine via the engine that you will find powering our personalized recommendations to boost products for a shopper, when we would recommend that to them.

42:40

So, how does this work? How does this work? As a first time shopper, I’m going to start viewing a couple of different products. I might add a product to my cart. And from that, we can develop a profile of the shopper of the types of things that they like, and begin to order, they’re, um, they’re searching categories, slightly differently. So in a moment, I’ll demo sort of a first time, you know, shopping experience, where I can demonstrate like a clear brand preference for one particular thing, that then changes my search result later on. See that happening live.

43:10

And then after a shopper journey for someone that’s a loyal customer. We can then use their purchase history to do that same thing, so that when they come back to the site, you know, maybe a few weeks or months later to buy something else. We have already primed them with. We know we sort of know exactly what types of things that they are looking for, and we’re able to give them search results or category results right away that include that personalization.

43:33

I can jump into the demo.

43:35

If you don’t have any questions, Greg, I’m just making some notes here, good demo, and then, a couple of questions.

43:42

Awesome. Hopefully, everyone can see my screen here.

43:46

So, this is more shame. Is there a very good example of this, because they sell several brands And so, in here, I’m able to demonstrate a brand preference.

43:55

So, I’m going to search for a gold watch today. Think maybe I’ll buy myself. A Christmas present.

44:01

So, if I do that, what I will find in my search results is some extremely expensive, sort of, above my pay grade types of watches. But I do get some seiko watches, which are totally within my, you know, within my budget for this type of thing. And I’ll start looking at a couple of them. So, I like to shop by by opening some things in tabs.

44:20

Maybe these are the things that I’ll buy like, this one as well.

44:23

And so, as I’ve sort of picked some of these different products. I know when I finally go to look at them. Probably this one’s not my style. This one, definitely not my style.

44:33

Badu like this one, I’m going to add this one to my cart.

44:37

Um, this one is also not really for me, so I’ll go and take a look in my cart here. So now what I’ve done here is I’ve looked at a few different seiko watches. So the engine is picked up on the fact that Seiko is a brand that I might be interested in, and I’ve also added this one to my cart If I were to go do this same gold watch, search again.

44:58

What you’ll see is that my search results have changed, and so, I’ll show the, before and after. So, before, my top results were these, these watches here, a couple car chase, and I had some SQL watches on the second row and a couple of other things.

45:11

And after I’ve shown, you know, my preference, for the sake of brand, Now, these watches are exactly what this search results is going to show me. Because this particular search, you know, was able to sort of break any ties up the top on these merchandising rules that the pushing to set up. And it’s it’s been able to say, You know, Nick, Nick really wants to take a watch. And not only that, but actually the the product that I had added to my cart on the original search was sort of in this eight slot here. I’ve added it to my cart, it’s not something that I’m likely to want to purchase again, so actually, have demoted that product as well. It’s in my cart and so it’s not something that, you know, what’s something that I would want to recommend, but I’ve got other different brands that I can see here. And you will see this, you know, if we were to spend time and browse around the site, you would see that the SQL brand will come up for me more often than it would anything else.

46:05

So, Nick, while you were demonstrating that for us had a question Olivia asked, is this tide or these results tied to an IP address or they tied to individual shopping session?

46:16

What’s the harder how do we get those results?

46:19

Yeah, for sure. So initially, we tie them into a, just a cookie that will stay on the site for a short amount of time.

46:26

And then after that, once they’ve, once they’ve checked out, if they were to log in to the site, we will be able to tie it back together to their, you know, say they’re Magento or they’re, when they’re Shopify site ID. So anything that, that can tie them back to the user that they were previously, but in a local session like this, are stored in the cookie and past past into our search engine as, as a person shops around.

46:51

Yes, so I can get that, but I think what’s important right there and the way that I would think about it is if I’m a casual shopper, I can get personalized results. And if I am a returning loyal shopper, I can also get those personalized results that that’s a that’s a much better way to say it donated. Yeah. Perfect. Different different use cases. They’re different use cases. That’s great.

47:19

And so, in terms of buying a Christmas gift for yourself, is this something you do all the time, or do you leave that up to friends and family to buy you gifts, or do you just don’t tell them what you want?

47:32

It’s, It’s both. Typically, I’ll get something for myself, and then I’ll also prime everyone else, get me something as well.

47:38

I like opening things, so no. Even if I know what it is, fine.

47:43

OK, good, good. Good to know. Hey, if we can bring everybody back on, that will be great beliefs, and Colleen, and math.

47:52

There you are.

47:54

So, thanks so much for being on. We’re coming to the end of our of our time, We’ve had some great questions from the audience. And I want to mention a couple of things before we wind down too much, or mentioned a couple of things.

48:07

If you’re interested, if you’re in the audience here, and you’re interested in talking more about this, that QR code in the corner of your screen goes right to Matt.

48:16

So if you want to book some time with Matt, scan that QR code and you can book some time, right? Right, with man, He’s got that fantastic royal wave there.

48:26

So, I was just, I’ve been making notes this whole time, just thinking through the concepts that you’re talking about and trying to distill that down, if I, if I think back about our poll. It’s like, OK, I don’t spend enough time on site search, so what are the things that are important to me. I just want to make that list, and get any reaction from the panel here before, before we’re done. So my list started with shopper experience like site search is all about that shopper experience.

48:56

And keeping that as my kind of number one thought about the people they come to buy from me. What’s their experience like? Would. I enjoy having that experience?

49:07

The second part was really about, to me, it was about organizing your data so that it makes sense when you go to optimize search.

49:18

And that, that isn’t something that I have to do on my own.

49:21

I can call, well, at least suggested, I call her directly, but I’m sure you could call Coleen, too, and she would help you do that, but but like that, that’s not a thing. I have to do on my own, right? There’s, there’s help there.

49:35

Control seems to be a big concept, right? It seems very easy, Back to the brick and mortar store. I can hang the seasonal stuff right in front of the front door, but maybe it’s more. It’s more difficult for me to do that online, at my site.

49:50

And so having that control is an important part of what we want to do.

49:56

And that all then drives relevancy and search.

50:00

That gives us the ability to say, show this, not that, or show these things, and show these other things.

50:07

And then the ability to personalize when I’m glinda know something about my shoppers.

50:13

So that the list I made, any comments or thoughts about that list from anyone on the panel.

50:20

I’ll quickly chime in just to add on impact of site search, specifically.

50:25

Because oftentimes, three, 5% of your traffic is using site Search, and that 3% is 3, 4, or five times more likely to convert than, in general browser, So it’s high impact, regardless of how much usage there is, it’s best optimize it, Right? Yeah. Go even further. Write it that 3% influence. We see it all the time, 20% of all of your orders, or your entire revenue, Right?

50:52

And so, you think 3%, and that’s a small percentage of the overall folks that are coming to your site. But it has such a huge impact. And so, yeah, I mean, you ultimately come to search Brinker for the AI, right? And some people just let that ride, but it’s coupled with the control that you can have. And there’s a lot of different avenues for that.

51:14

Whether you’re looking at the reporting and deriving no tactics from that.

51:21

Or you’re using the Merchandising right, the Global Campaigns, the Individual Merchandising Campaigns, and doing your best to re-order the items on the page, so that it speaks to how shoppers are actually searching on your site.

51:39

Elise Knick, any final, final thoughts for us?

51:44

I think just the overall, this is so relieving just to me, if, I you know as, if I put my merchandise, our hat on, or just in the conversations that I have, again, just to emphasize the amount of control that you do have over. This is something that, you’ve built a good team, whether it’s you, and then your, your customer success manager, whoever you got partnered up with you, trust that team, and we’ll talk through the different the different project goals that we have for the site. But again, just at the end of the day, it’s we’re leading to realize that you can make some really, really big changes that have a great impact on the site by no shifting, just a couple of things throughout the site. So, but otherwise, we built a beautiful house, this group foundation.

52:21

Right.

52:22

Thanks, Elise. Thanks Matt. Thanks, Colleen, and Nick, thank you to really appreciate it.

52:27

Again, if you want to talk to us, you want to get on Matt’s calendar, scan that QR code, simple to do, and on behalf of everybody at Searchspring, thank you very much.

52:38

We will be back with all fresh set of webinars in 20 23. And look forward to to having everybody join us there.

52:47

So thanks very much, have a great day, and we really appreciate your time today.

52:51

Take care.