Posted on 17 April 2008 by Hurol No Comments

Using site search analysis in integrated marketing

Two years ago, in my book Search Analytics, I said that “the quality of onsite search is poor and the idea that it can be studied to optimise websites is yet to reach critical mass acceptance.”

I lamented the fact that site search was a vastly neglected – yet eminently useful – tool on company websites.

So what’s changed in two years?

At Bienalto, we have witnessed a huge shift in attitude towards site search, which is great news for the user experience.

Recently, we’ve been working with a number of our clients on site search refinement (or faceted search). This helps to rectify the main problems with site search: high exit rates and low selection rates.

Check out the ‘Refine Search’ section of the Austrade site for an example of what we’ve been doing with our clients.

Further afield, Google now offers Internal Search Analysis reports. These reports tell you how many visitors use your site search tool, bounce rates, abandonment, search refinement and more. Avinash Kaushik shows you how Google’s tool works and provides useful steps to help you get more value from the tool.

Other analysts are getting on board the ‘site search analytics’ bandwagon too. Louis Rosenfeld and Richard Wiggins are writing a book, Search Analytics: Conversations with your Customers, due for publication in 2008.

Rosenfeld and Wiggins clearly ‘get it’, saying on the book’s blurb that “Search queries are gold.”

Check out Rosenfeld’s Site search analytics workshop slides if you want detailed instruction of site search analytics plus plenty of working examples.

Apart from these changes, the good news is that the methods and instruction described in Search Analytics still apply, and the benefits of using site search analytics to improve the user experience are as strong as ever.

Broader application

In addition to the goldmine offered up by analysing customer behaviour on your site’s search, you can use the data from site search to boost the performance of email marketing campaigns, too.

Regular readers will know that we have talked a lot about cross channel marketing and 360 measurement and reporting lately.

Site search analytics can become a powerful tool in the ‘integrated’ approach, allowing you to target email campaigns with content that your customers tell you they want to read about (through the search terms they use).