In this presentation, given at eCommerce Expo in Istanbul, Turkey in May 2013, we talk about how to make sure your site search is designed around your customer and focussed on building connections between your customers and your onsite data

1. Making connections:
make your site search drive your sales,
not drive your customer away.

2. This is the best photo I could find
John Tomlinson
Chief Operating Officer
International Director
@JohnRTomlinson
Colbenson
Experts in site search
@Colbenson

3. Search in e-Commerce

4. How customers find stuff

5. How customers find stuff

6. How customers find stuff

7. Findability
The ability of users to identify an appropriate Web site and navigate the
pages of the site to discover and retrieve relevant information resources
(Peter Morville, 2005)
The measure for how easily your customers can make the right
connections to your data
(Colbenson)

8. How can we measure findability?

9. Findability analytics

10. What to measure (1)
1. Overall measures
• How many: volume of searches
• Percentage of visitors who search
• Percentage of purchases from searches
• Average spend per sale from searches
• Average price per search
2. Findability (top level)
• Percentage of CTR total (greens):
• CTR from generated results
• CTR from banners and sponsored links
• Percentage of abandonments (reds)
• Percentage of redo (ambers)

11. What to measure (2)
3. Connections
• For each Results and Landing page:
• Duration, CTR, pagination, filters
• Actions on the page (scroll, add to cart or other call2action etc.)
• Connections made via AutoComplete content (split by type of content)
4. Obstacles
• Percentage of "next page" clicks
• Percentage filtered
• Percentage Zero results
• Average duration on the results page

12. What to measure (3)
5. Search analysis
• Search content:
• Top search themes and terms
• Most popular search (frequency of each search)
• Findability for each search term
• Volume of each search term
• Clustered analysis of search terms

13. How customers find stuff

14. Snakes and ladders

15. What gets in the way?

16. Avoiding obstacles

17. Start with the customer

18. Start with the customer

19. Focus on opportunities

20. Join stuff up

21. Join stuff up

22. Join stuff up

23. Don’t leave a dead end

24. Don’t leave a dead end

25. Use AutoComplete

26. Use AutoComplete

27. Use AutoComplete

28. Don’t stop

29. Customer 1.0
Source: Jeffrey Rayport (Harvard Business Review)
http://blogs.hbr.org/events/2012/11/delivering-the-best-online-sho.html

30. Customer 2.0
Source: Jeffrey Rayport (Harvard Business Review)
http://blogs.hbr.org/events/2012/11/delivering-the-best-online-sho.html

31. Customer 3.0
Source: Jeffrey Rayport (Harvard Business Review)
http://blogs.hbr.org/events/2012/11/delivering-the-best-online-sho.html

32. People are emotional
[H]ow your employees interact with your customers determines how the
customer will feel about your company.
You want your employees to be using their emotional intelligence to get
and stay in an upbeat, empathic space, and to relate to your customers
from that state ... the most effective employees were adept at emotional
intelligence competencies like emotional self-management ... empathy ...
and collaboration.
(Daniel Goleman, 2012)

33. People are expressive
The force of language is much aided by the expressive movements of the
face and body.
(Charles Darwin The Expression of emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
Life is inherently expressive
(Kym Maclaren)

34. E-commerce must be expressive too!

35. Summary

36. www.colbenson.com
@Colbenson