Digital marketing departments invest great amounts of money and staffing resources trying to position themselves in the most effective way to present and ultimately, sell their products. Every digital marketing strategy today needs a competitive edge in order to turn visitors into conversions and buyers into loyal customers. When it comes to having a secret weapon, marketing strategy in eCommerce, nearly no digital marketing tool is as effective as a finely tuned search engine and the data it provides you. When your visitor’s search results are personalised in a way that will be most attractive to them, the probability of conversion greatly increases. In this blog, we will cover the effect a powerful search engine such as HawkSearch can have not only on sales but also how you can increase ROI and conversions by utilising the data found in the HawkSearch reporting tools.
When looking at the effectiveness of having an on-site search tool, a number of HawkSearch customers have reported the following favourable data points after implementing the search engine.
- 112% increase in monthly onsite search sessions after implementing HawkSearch.
- 3X greater conversion rate as compared to visitors who browsed by navigation alone.
- An average of 66% of visitors interacted with the HawkSearch powered site tool.
- Significant gains in average order value and number of items purchased.
- 20% increase in revenue of “clearance/sale” merchandise.
Think about that. Nearly 70% of online visitors prefer to use a search tool to find what they are looking for, as compared to standard site navigation methods. Statistics also confirm that when shoppers receive search results that are personalised and relevant to them, they purchase those products.
Mining For More Gold – Utilising Metrics Report
So, we have seen that nearly 70% of online visitors use a search bar. But wait, there’s more. Effective search engines also capture a ton of really helpful data regarding visitor behaviour and trends. Utilising this data can take a lot of the guesswork out of your digital marketing strategy moving forward.
HawkSearch has some very powerful metrics reports that can help you understand how to maximise your marketing ROI and conversions. Here are a few of them: conversion summary measures the sales generated from top keywords and helps in refining search results settings to maximise effectiveness or feature certain items for greater reach. Being able to fully optimise the top keywords that online visitors are using can help increase exposure for those items of interest.
Top 250 Facets
Facets can be described as attributes such as size, colour, fabric, or gender. Recognising site visitor trends by studying the most popular facets can help highlight the products that sell the best. HawkSearch utilises facets to maximise search refinement. If an online shopper can quickly drill down their search results by narrowing their focus to items with specific attributes, the chance of conversion goes way up. Shoppers normally already have in mind the characteristics of the items they are looking for and facets help them get to those desired products much more quickly. As a result, facets play an important role in providing satisfactory search experiences for site visitors.
Top 250 Keywords
Captures the specific keywords that visitors have chosen and the number of times they have been used. This report is very helpful in not only understanding which products are the most searched for, but also how visitors are describing them.
Searches With Poor Results
Logs the description of searches that return poor results and the number of times it has occurred. This report can help sellers recognise opportunities to minimise or eliminate lost sales.
Pagination Activity
Summary of the number of searches that stopped on the first page of results, second page, third, etc. Knowing how many pages into the search results your shoppers will have to go before finding something is helpful when considering whether an adjustment is needed to where certain products appear in the search results.
It’s clear, with nearly 7/10 shoppers using an on-site search tool as an aid, it’s more important than ever to have an effective search engine driving personalised, relevant results to visitors. Your digital marketing strategy depends on it. In addition, by utilising the reporting data found in HawkSearch, you can greatly increase your effectiveness by eliminating a lot of guesswork from your marketing efforts. Speak with a HawkSearch expert today to learn more about how you can increase conversions by optimising your on-site search.
About HawkSearch
HawkSearch is an intelligent search and recommendations platform that powers success for any size business across all industries. Our goal is to equip organisations with innovative tools to deliver accurate and customisation search experiences that enable users to find the relevant results for their needs in context, no matter the device, platform, or language. With 1500+ implementations completed, HawkSearch is utilised for delivering engaging and personalised search functionality through our innovative features, which enable marketers, merchandisers, and developers to accomplish their goals.