Is It Time To Audit Your Onsite Search Strategy?
Simple strategies yield better results when it comes to improving Onsite Search relevance for shoppers
Onsite (Site) Search is critical for ecommerce success.
Site Search users have a higher propensity to convert.
Time & effort spent optimizing Site Search is really valuable because it is a high converting tool.
According to Salesforce, 20% of all orders are driven by Site Search. This number spikes during holidays.
Search based traffic has a higher propensity to convert - sometimes, 2-3X higher than site average.
According to the latest Salesforce Shopping Index, industry average usage for Site Search is at 6% and share of Search influenced orders is 16%.
These numbers are low. Considering the fact that Search-driven shoppers convert at a higher rate, brands should want these numbers to be a lot higher.
In fact, these numbers have been historically at the same point. When looking at Search Usage across the most recent quarters, data shows that this number has been low for a while now.
What’s even more worrying is that usage numbers have been trending in the wrong direction in the most recent couple of years.
Brand innovation has stalled on Site Search experience.
Site Search is either hidden or hard to use or sometimes both.
In a world where the “discovery” stage of the shopper’s journey is distinctively skewed towards mobile and small screen formats in general, Site Search is difficult to find and use.
Brands think about “going mobile” as just introducing support for Responsive Design. That’s not an acceptable strategy anymore. It is just stable stakes. It is the price of entry to play to win the shopper’s business.
Combine this with the fact that mobile sessions are shorter and you can get the perfect recipe for “abandoned browse” sessions.
Specifically, during the holiday season (for that matter, during whatever the “seasonal peak” is for the brand), shopper journey shortens. During the holiday season of 2023, Salesforce Shopping Index data showed that around one-third of all shopping started as organic search (Google, Bing, etc.). It is unclear why Site Searches are only around 6%, then. When Search as a discovery tool takes on such a prominent role in driving the shopper to the site, why don’t they exhibit a similar prominence in driving the shopper to their desired products on the site?
Shoppers are driven by expedience, even if some of that comes at the expense of “experience”. Amazon has leaned heavily into this behavioral constant.
Nobody ever said that Amazon’s shopping experience is delightful. However, nobody ever argues the expediency and efficiency that Amazon introduces into its journey. The largest catalog on Earth makes Site Search front & center of its shopper journey. Brands can learn a thing or two from everybody’s favorite “frenemy”.
Simple strategies yield great results. Always.
An excellent research study from the digital consultancy To The Web, indicates that by merely exposing the Search box more prominently, you could see up to 4X increase in usage. Not unlike Salesforce, they used an anonymized aggregation of their clients’ analytics data, combined with some first-party research to arrive at this conclusion. Albeit the research wasn’t focused on ecommerce specifically, the findings seem to hold up for any site where Search is part of the user journey.
One hypothesis of why this is happening is our heavy reliance on Responsive Design to account for an increase in mobile shoppers. The adoption of responsive constructs seems to have relegated the Search feature to get buried under a magnifying glass on the site. To be fair, until a few years ago, it was more important to have the page just load quickly on mobile devices, functionality be damned.
In fact, in the research cited previously, increasing the prominence of the Search bar on mobile devices seems to have been exactly what the doctor ordered. Search usage increased by 2X after that change.
Another hypothesis is that there is a crisis of confidence among digital merchandising teams. With the onslaught of new technology pieces that these teams have had to wrestle with in the recent years, perhaps there is some risk aversion associated with trying to “do too much” with Site Search. As a result, Search gets relegated to “Let them use it if they can find it” portion of the user experience.
What does all this have to do with the holidays? Well… we know that holiday shoppers are looking for value (i.e. promotions) but we also know, both from research data and personal experiences, that these shoppers are intentional and they are looking for expediency.
Intentionality and expediency are exactly the promises that Site Search delivers on.
Speaking of intentionality, it seems like we are approaching the end of the Keyword-era. An era marked by trying to figure out words, their meaning to the shopper and then trying to influence the Search engine to deliver a relevant set of results based on words and phrases.
The rapid influence of GenAI driven search in shoppers’ daily lives point to an incoming change of expectations. That shoppers want answers, not results. That shoppers’ intentionality will be expressed in full sentences in the near future. We all grew up in an era where searching something on the internet meant knowing what keywords to use to get the information we needed. Same applied to ecommerce search - we created mental models of words and their relationship to the results we sought.
According to primary research by Salesforce, using GenAI has shown to increase usage 3X higher this year compared to last year. 54% of shoppers were interested in using a conversational interface and interacting using natural language to find what they wanted, instead of trying to find the right keyword that may or may not show them the desired results.
Again - intentionality matters. Intentional shoppers are some of the best shoppers a brand could hope for. By adopting a simple, common sense approach, to serving them, every brand can have a better holiday season this year.