Internal Search‘The Forgotten Child of Web Analytics’

Charles MeadenDigital Nation

A Very Brief History

• I’ve been involved in web analytics since 1995

• Run a small digital agency in Mumbles, Wales

• Came to look at internal search from a usability and user experience perspective

• Worked on internal search for large ecommerce clients, charities and government departments and councils

Why The ‘Lost Child’?

• Some analysts don’t bother to look too deeply into internal search as at first glance it doesn’t look like search is used that often.

Understanding User Intent

• “Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words” Lou Rosenfield

• It’s the closest you’ll getting to what the customer is thinking without actually talking to them

• Understand this and you can start improving your

– Navigation

– Search results

– The whole user journey

Allows For Quick And Easy Fixes

• Depending on the platform, it’s a relatively simple job to tweak the platform to fine tune the results

• Google Site Search allows you to

– Add Synonyms

– Date Bias the results

– Categorise the results

Show All The Routes To Your Content

It’s Not Just About The Search Box

Tip 1: Use Your Analytics Internal Search Tool

• It makes your life easier• A lot of the tools and reports are already setup

Tip 2: How Deep Is Your Long Tail?

• Which words standout?• What % of the total searches do your top 10 search phrases

represent

4,752 unique phrases and 8,414 unique searches

Top ten only account for 15% of searches

Tip 3: Where Are People Searching On Your Site?

• Which pages are generating the most searches?

• Are there areas of your site that are generating more searches than others

Tip 4: Collect Your Failed Searches

• This doesn’t always come as default

• You’ll need to get your developers to find a way to capture this

– Via the URL

– Via Javascript

• Once you have it, you can:

– Fine tune your search / autocompletes

– See how your potential customers describe your services

– Find out what your visitors think you are offering

– Source new products to sell

Tip 5: Discover Where People Go Next

• Mine your analytics package to find out where people go after the search results page

• Use Regular Expressions and / or SQL to manipulate the data

• Find out whether people got a content page or did they just go back to the home page

Up to 20,000 different combinations per week

Tip 6: How Many Searched and Then Left?

• What proportion of users search and then leave the site?

Tip 7: What Types Of User Are Searching?

• Segment, Segment and then Segment again…

• Thing to look out for

– New or Returning Visitors

– Where did they enter the site

– Where did they come from

– Are they customers or prospects?

Tip 8: Cross Match Organic / PPC Phrases

• What's the difference between the phrase someone entered into Google and the one they used on your site?

Tip 9: Does Search Help or Hinder Conversions?

• Are people who use search more or less likely to convert?

• If more, what phrases work best

• If less, what are the ‘stop phrases’

Tip 10: Look For Patterns In Your Data

• Are there certain types of searches that appear?

• How often do advice or questions appear

– “how to”,

– “help on”

– “how can”

• Are people using abbreviations or shorthand

• Catalogue numbers from printed brochures around mailings

– If too catalogue numbers appear as failed searches, you may have an issue

Tip 11: What Are Your Most Common Words?

• Your analytics tool will give you the most common search phrases

• Are there certain words and phrases that keep on appearing?

• Tools such as Textanz will happily crunch 100,000 of phrases an and display the most common words and phrases used within it

• Give these to your

– Copywriters

– SEO and PPC staff and agencies

Tip 12: How Good Are Your Search Results?

• Two metrics will tell you just how good your search is– Number of results pages people searched through– How many times they refined their search

Tip 13: How Are People Refining Your Faceted Search

• If you’re using filtered or faceted search, what’s the most popular refinements people make?

Tip 14: Learn SQL

• Or make friends with someone who knows it

• Internal search can throw up 100,000’s of rows of data

• Excel has it’s limits

• Processing Power is cheap

– Use a cloud service such as Amazon AWS and crunch data for less than 50 per hour

Tip 15: Setup Search as a Goal

• A Google Analytics tip

• Setting up the search result page as a Goal lets you use the ‘Reverse Goal Path’

• You can then see the three previous pages

– The page they searched from

– The two previous pages before that

• Hat tip to Tim Leighton-Boyce for that tip

Tip 16: Don’t Just Rely on Your Analytics

• Use tools such as Clicktale to observe your users

• Run some live usability tests and ask users why they searched in a particular way

• Run tests on your current search results and classify the results

– The excellent Lou Rosenfield “Search Site Analytics” has plenty of good examples

Some Further Reading

• Read “Search Site Analytics for Your Site” by Lou Rosenfeld

– PDF and Print versions

• View all the articles I’ve tagged as site_search on Pinboard

• Follow me on twitter @charlesmeaden

• Visit us at www.digitalnation.co.uk