Measuring the effectiveness of site search
The quality of your site search can make or break your website. A well-functioning search engine makes the content more accessible to users and helps improve their online experience. With this in mind, it is essential to measure the effectiveness of search functionality. This excerpt from Measuring the Success of Your Website shows you how.
According to a research report from Forrester, 90% of firms rate search as `very important’ or `extremely important’, but 52% do not actually measure its effectiveness. This means that website owners don’t know if people can find what they are looking for when they use the search function.
As online content continues to grow, and as users become more experienced in their interactions with websites, search functionality has become more popular as a way of navigating a site. A retailer who participated in the Forrester research reported that one-third of its traffic is found on the search results page.
Does this ring true with your experience as a user in visiting websites? How often do you locate the position of the keyword search function, and then start searching?
As search functionality becomes increasingly commonplace on websites, it’s more important to measure its effectiveness. By doing so, you will:
- Discover the needs of users by assessing what they are searching for
- Learn users’ choice of vocabulary when searching for content on your site
- Measure how the search results lead to desired actions
- Replicate users’ search activity using the same keywords to identify the difference between what they see and what you want them to see.
How to measure site search
Basically, measuring the effectiveness of site search functionality involves three activities.
1. Define what you want people to see
This is a strategic decision and will be different from one site to another. Suffice it to say that you can limit, select, categorise, prioritise, and personalise the search results.
For example, a retail site can stop the display of a press release about their new range of dairy products when a shopper enters the keyword “dairy” (limiting the search results). The same retailer might offer the shopper both higher-priced and lower-priced options in a featured search results section, while listing everything else underneath (selecting). Again, the same retailer might list the subcategories of dairy products in the search results, as opposed to listing the individual products so that the shopper can drill down themselves (categorising). Alternatively, the search results might list products in order of price (prioritising). Finally, placing the brands that the shopper has purchased before at the top of the list is another option (personalising).
2. Monitor the search functionality and outcomes (Search Term Analysis)
The second activity requires capturing the keywords used in the searches and monitoring the outcomes of the searches, also referred to as Search Term Analysis. Recording the keywords and establishing a mechanism to assess the performance of the site against these keywords is essential for measuring the effectiveness of onsite search functionality. In the Forrester research mentioned above, one of the participant companies performed the search for the top keyword manually, and discovered that the right answer for the top query came in at number 47 on the search results. For the top keywords in particular, performing manual searches yourself is a valuable process.
3. Aligning the search functionality
You will occasionally hear site operators complaining that customers use the “wrong” keywords in their searches. This is an unwarranted complaint, because organisations should speak the same language as their customers in the first place, and they should be taking the opportunity to learn their customers’ terminology from the search keywords.
There are two other things to consider when analysing keywords. First, some of them are seasonal and can expire at any given time - for example, if a popular event has drawn to a close. Second, you should produce metatags from the top keywords for search engine registrations. It is very likely that other people will use the same keywords to search for your site.
Conclusion
If the path analysis shows that a lot of people leave the site after they view the search results, you must investigate why. On the one hand, it might mean that your search results show sufficient information to meet your visitor’s needs. Conversely, it might indicate that the results are not good enough to entice the user to drill deeper in the site. In the second situation, it could be either that the information returned does not accurately convey the meaning and value of the content kept on the site, or that the content itself is unsatisfactory to the visitors and does not encourage them to look any further.
If the search cannot return any results, you might consider recommending alternatives – which might help you to retain the user. These could include:
- An advanced search functionality to try again
- Displaying an alternative navigation mechanism (such as the site map)
- Asking the user’s permission to email him or her later when the site has developed content on the search keyword.
Search functionality is significant for many websites. If you are the operator of one of these sites, your can choose to build it in-house, or you can use a commercially developed program. Regardless of your choice, you should ensure that the activities performed on the search functionality are measured for effectiveness.
This is an excerpt from Measuring the Success of Your Website.