Online marketers often focus so much energy on driving new visitors to their website that they often overlook the activities on their website that are most critical to converting and growing loyal visitors and customers.  Consider internal site search – According to a Google report on internal site search, 90 percent of companies report that search is the No. 1 means of navigation on their site and 82 percent of visitors use site search to find the information they need.  Given that 80 percent of visitors will reportedly abandon a site if search functionality is poor, enhanced internal site search functionality may be your highest return investment opportunity.

The ROI Can Be Compelling

As we noted in a previous entry, Website Redesigns Gone Good, we helped a client to implement enhanced search capability that resulted in a 35% decline in the volume of search abandonment.  For our client that represented over 100,000 consumers each year who were far more likely to make a purchase and who left the website experience more satisfied and more likely to return – also helping to drive a 20 percent increase in web site driven revenues.  eFollett.com, who provides access to over 1,400 online bookstores across the United States and Canada, installed a new site search engine and grew web sales by 23%.

So where to start?

STEP 1: Analyze how visitors to your site use your current site search

No surprise here – given our emphasis on analytics and understanding site behavior.  If configured properly, any reputable analytics solution should provide extremely valuable information.

• Pay particular attention to bounce rates, exit rates, and conversion rates by keyword.
• On the highest volume keywords, what results are presented, in which order, and to which pages did visitors navigate.
• A high volume of search activity on particular categories of keywords can reflect important deficiencies in the navigation of your site.
• Segment your audience and develop an understanding of how different types of users use site search.
• It’s important to remember that in most cases the majority of traffic to your site does not start on the home page.  This can change the context for why someone may do a search.
• This step is often necessary to build the business case for any investment in enhanced internal site search capabilities.

In addition to helping you to identify where your current search and site navigation is falling short, analyzing your search traffic can also help you develop a better understanding of your website visitors.

STEP 2: Research best practice internal site search features

Competitor websites or the websites for market leaders in related industries can often be very helpful in this regard.  Some of the most common enhanced features include:

• Search filtering (e.g. price, product/content type, brand, color, etc) – Over 88% of the top 500 online retailers offer search filtering – those that don’t are primarily due to narrow product offering.
• Search Relevancy/Prioritization – Advanced search tools provide powerful methods for altering the order in which search results are returned.  For example, you may want to give higher priority to high conversion or high margin products.
• Redirects – When you have created a page that has been optimized to address a particular topic or product category, you can have a visitor automatically redirected to that page when they search on a related keyword.
• Keyword Specific Promotions – Much like redirects, specific promotions can be displayed for specific keyword searches.  If, for example, someone did a search on “green golf bag”, the search results page might contain a promotion related to golf items.
• Spelling Correction and Synonyms – Nothing will deter a visitor more than getting a “No items found” search result (and this feature is particularly helpful for a poor speller like me).  A search at Officemax.com on “Digital Overhead Projecter” returns “Presentation Equipment & Supplies” and “Projectors & Accessories” as category options.
• Sorting Options (e.g. price, product rating) – Just providing useful sorting options on search results can increase search effectiveness considerably.

STEP 3:  Identify Opportunities for Specialized Searches

Look for opportunities to develop specialized search capabilities for important product lines or content types.  This necessitates really understanding how visitors search for specific types of products or content.  For example, one of our clients who offers artificial Christmas trees, dramatically increased conversion by providing a more structured search that allows visitors to easily select attributes like the size, color, and lighting of the different trees offered.  OfficeMax offers an entirely different method for searching for printer ink that allows the visitor to select the brand and model of your printer.  You can also significantly reduce customer support costs by providing customer support content via search.

STEP 4: Evaluate SaaS (“Software as a Service”) Internal Site Search Offerings

The SaaS model allows websites to provide powerful search capabilities to your visitors without visitors ever knowing that a 3rd party is providing the functionality.  The SaaS model can provide several benefits, including:

• Reliable and scalable infrastructure
• Lower cost of ownership
• Easier upgrades
• Faster time to market
• Experienced support staff
• Derive benefits of collective development on an ongoing basis

There are dozens vendors in this space, but the following are some of the leaders in the space:
•    Endeca
•    Omniture SiteSearch (Mercado)
•    SLI
•    Celebros
•    EasyAsk

Not surprisingly, each of these vendors (and the others not listed here) has strengths and weaknesses and should be evaluated in the context of the information you gather in Steps 1 through 3.

Follow the steps outlined above and you may see returns beyond your expectations.  Good luck and please contact us if you have any questions.  Also, we would be interested in any examples of high profile websites that you think have especially strong or weak internal search capabilities (let us know in a comment below)?

Image: Johanna Hobbs

In the digital world change is constant and there seems to be an unending supply of new buzzwords and the latest and greatest strategies and tactics.  For most executives whose primary role is not to scour through digital media trade publications, research, blogs, rss feeds and e-mail newsletters, the flow of new information can be overwhelming.  Often, executives respond to this by either ignoring it or dismissing much of it as fads and clutter distracting them from the primary functions of their business.  Frequently, this is reinforced by the fact that, when it comes to digital trends, they believe that more often than not their “I told you so” assessments have occurred far more often than their “we missed that boat” concessions.

But here is the problem: if an executive is wrong and she missed that enormous opportunity for her business, the “we missed that boat” realization rarely ever occurs.  The reality is that most missed opportunities go unnoticed while the “I told you so’s” almost never do.   This becomes even more valid in a tough economic climate when every dollar of spending is being scrutinized.

Even the most senior executives should make it their challenge to better understand the digital world.  The digital realm is outside the area of expertise for most senior executives in most businesses and they should not be afraid to say, “Explain it to me as if I were a child.”  Likewise, executives should not go into these discussions thinking “I doubt it, prove it to me.”  They need to be thinking “there may be an opportunity, how can I motivate my team to stretch and think creatively to exploit new opportunities.”  We’ve witnessed great ideas coming from the most unlikely sources when leadership kept its mind open to creative thinking.

When executives make time to be educated about digital (and truly listen) and take the time to convey the needs and goals of the business, opportunities can be uncovered through collaboration and creative thinking and great results can be achieved.

Likewise, it’s critical that executives have individuals who they can trust who will educate them and are familiar with digital strategies, tactics, trends, available research, industry benchmarks, competitive analysis, and methods for testing and surveying customer and prospects.  Just as important, however, executives need to feel as though their digital strategists will listen and understand the keys to their business, their goals, their strategies, and their customers and prospects.  If you are an executive or owner who is ultimately responsible for your digital strategy and you do not have this trusted resource, make this a priority or you may be missing significant opportunities to grow the profitability of your business.

Ultimately, you should choose which digital initiatives to pursue based on the merit of the business cases used to support them and evaluate them on the measurable results they produce.  But if you do not commit the time and energy to better understanding digital, then the true cost may be the significant opportunities you don’t even know you have missed.

Photo: StarrGazr

One of the greatest advantages of online marketing is the marketers’ ability to quickly adjust and respond to the data they can obtain directly from their interactions with their market.  However, each organization is at a different stage in terms of their online measurement sophistication and each faces barriers to becoming more effective at optimizing their web marketing.

Avinash Kaushik recently posted a good blog entry on Barriers To An Effective Web Measurement Strategy.  In the blog, he recommends some first steps in overcoming the following 11 barriers to an effective online measurement strategy that were cited in Econsultancy’s Online Measurement and Strategy Report.

1.  Lack of budget/resources (45%)
2.  Lack of strategy (31%)
3.  Siloed organization (29%)
4.  Lack of understanding (25%)
5.  Too much data (18%)
6.  Lack of senior management buy-in (18%)
7.  Difficulty reconciling data (17%)
8.  IT blockages (17%)
9.  Lack of trust in analytics (16%)
10. Finding staff (12%)
11. Poor technology (9%)

While I did find Avinash’s insights on each of the barriers valuable, I think the list of barriers is flawed in that it confuses the symptoms with the actual barriers.  Could you imagine, for example, if a baseball manager explained that the reason his team was losing was because he was getting “too much data” from his statistician (point 5 from the barrier list).  If he did, he would not be manager for long.  It’s the manager’s job to determine which stats are important and will make a difference in his game strategy.  While I’m sure there are many executives and analysts who feel that they do have to sift through too much data, the true barrier is the lack of a good strategy that focuses the organization on a few core metrics that get to the heart of what you are trying to accomplish.

Given our experience in helping many organizations with their data driven optimization, I think the 11 point barrier list could be refined down to the following 4 core barriers.

1.  Strategy
It all starts with a good strategy.  It’s necessary for obtaining management buy-in and for ultimately attaining the ROI on any investments made in optimization initiatives.  It is critical that the strategy identify a small set of critical metrics that are meaningful to management and drive any ROI business case.

It’s also important to recognize that the web optimization strategy needs to evolve as the web optimization capabilities of the organization evolve.  The strategy is about pinpointing the most important constraints that you need to overcome and focusing your time and resources on making that happen.  Often this may require small steps first to gain credibility and management buy-in.

2.  Management Buy-in
Not surprisingly, once you obtain management buy-in, many of the symptoms begin to disappear.  Certainly lack of budget/resources and IT blockages begin to dissipate if you have the support of senior management.  While it is likely the most important barrier to overcome, this can often be the most difficult.  It’s also important to recognize that until management is willing to make some level of investment in analytics and optimization, then they have not really bought-in.

This often creates a chicken or the egg situation where the online marketer asks, “How do I credibly demonstrate ROI on the investment prior to making the investment”?   Early on this is where the hard work and innovative thinking must occur to implement examples of how data-driven initiatives can provide the ROI necessary to develop a strong business case.  The good news is that with the use of inexpensive, often free, tools in combination with some good analysis, it is not too difficult to gain credibility by demonstrating substantive ROI.  This is often the key objective of organizations that are relatively early in their web optimization evolution.

3.  Infrastructure for Testing, Analysis, and Change
The infrastructure I am addressing here includes the website or ecommerce management technology as well as the implementation of the analytics tools.  We have come across many situations where online marketers have properly identified what are potentially significant improvements that will really move the needle on their core metrics, but the amount of work involved to test or implement the changes were believed to be too significant to justify the investment.

This can be a daunting challenge in that the investment in the current infrastructure and the staff to support it may have been significant and modifications may be difficult and expensive.  In many cases this requires working actively with someone who is technically proficient enough to implement some relatively small tests across several areas that when viewed together make a strong case for an investment in a new infrastructure or new component to that infrastructure.  In other cases, this is more of an uphill battle and the key becomes just recognizing the constraints and focusing on those areas where improvements can be made.

4.  Skills and Time for Testing, Analysis, and Change
In my opinion this is the most overlooked and most underestimated barrier that must be overcome.   Many organizations that have implemented analytics either largely ignore the analytics reports, don’t have time to analyze them, or generate reports that provide little in terms of insights that stimulate changes that improve the critical metrics and provide a high ROI.  In order for an organization to effectively implement data-driven optimization, they must have time from the personnel who know what data they should be focused on, what tests should be implemented, and what actions should be taken as a result of the analysis.  This, by the way, does not mean that an analyst should be doing all of the analysis.  In fact, quite the opposite, they need to know how to get the appropriate people throughout the organization involved in the analysis (the “Why” behind the “What” happened).   As the benefits of this time become apparent, it becomes easier to build this testing and analysis into normal work processes.

Most organizations also tend to under invest in the time required from the personnel who are necessary to effectively carry out tests.  For example, designing multiple versions of a page for A/B or multivariate testing can pay significant dividends.  Organizations need to plan accordingly for copywriting and design resources in order to make these tests successful.

By focusing in on and addressing these four key areas, the other issues on the Econsultancy list will likely be addressed in the process.  What do you think of the 11 barriers identified in the Econsultancy study?

There are several reasons why an online marketer wants to know how much traffic a site other than their own is receiving:

• You may want to compare how much traffic a competitors’ site is getting.
• In reviewing the landscape of sites your target customers are visiting, you may want to ballpark the volume of traffic to each in order to get a sense of their relative prominence.
• When reviewing the sources of traffic to your website, you may identify a new source that has had good conversion success and you may want to determine if they have a significant audience and would like to see if that audience is growing. If so, you may want to pursue a more in-depth relationship with that source.
• It may also help to provide focus in trying to establish high quality links to your site for SEO purposes.

There are now several free traffic estimation services (Amit Agarwal did a nice job of outlining these options in his article, Find Out How Much Traffic a Website is Getting). However, one obvious question is how accurate is the data?

In order to help answer that question, we evaluated the quality of these estimation services against the web analytics data collected through Omniture, Google, etc. for a subset of our clients. We thought that the quality of those estimates might vary significantly depending upon how heavy the volume of traffic was to the site being estimated. As such, we grouped the results based on site activity: heavy, moderate, and light. When available, we also evaluated how accurately the services reflected the trend of the site traffic as well as the volume of visits and visitors for the following traffic estimation services: Alexa, Compete, Google Ad Planner, Google Trends, QuantCast, and StatBrain.

The following table shows how the free sources compared to the data collected by our clients’ analytics programs (e.g. Compete’s estimation of traffic for moderate sites was lower than reported by the analytics tools used by those sites).

I should note that this was not a formal study, was based upon a relatively small sample set, and other factors may impact the results (e.g. relative volume of paid search marketing may influence the accuracy of some sites versus others).

A few observations/conclusions:

1. Not surprisingly, the quality of the estimates is considerably better for higher volume websites.
2. At this point, there does not seem to be a reliable source for viewing site trends for lower volume websites and the trends for moderate traffic websites are not much better.
3. The growing volume of incremental demographic information being provided by some of these services is encouraging. Most of the demographic information is fairly rudimentary, but it is definitely more than what has been available in the past.
4. You should definitely review Dataopedia.com. In addition to pulling in data from Alexa, Compete, and QuantCast, this service displays other non-traffic related data such as Google Page Rank and Twitter posts related to the site.
5. Given that none of the free services provided accurate estimates in every scenario, you may be able to use our findings to make adjustments for your specific situation.

Has anyone else conducted a similar comparison? If so, what type of results did you find?

Since storming on to the scene in 2005, Google Analytics has turned a lot of heads and has garnered some serious consideration from some large companies who would have previously only considered the top tier vendor solutions.  Given that it is a feature rich solution and it’s free, the value proposition seems to be difficult to dispute.

Yet, despite it being free, there have been a lot of ‘buyer beware’ articles written describing some of the hidden costs and risks associated with using Google Analytics.  Some of the costs/risks cited, for example, are the lack of customer support and training, data ownership issues, and despite its rich set of features, it does not provide the depth of analysis that a high-end analytics solution does.  And unfortunately you have to invest a lot of time with the tool to really identify its limitations.

So while these hidden costs are certainly relevant and should definitely be taken into consideration when evaluating analytics vendor options, I do believe Google Analytics is a compelling tool that can provide enormous value in evaluating the effectiveness of online marketing initiatives, understanding web site visitor behavior, and optimizing the performance of a web site.

But here’s the rub, the decision to use Google Analytics frequently conveys an implicit devaluation of the importance of the analysis of the data that actually provides the real value to the organization.

The use of Google Analytics is often a reflection of the diminished importance an organization places on obtaining the actionable insights that can provide extremely high returns.Of course there is no doubt that organizations are frequently guilty of not investing the time and energy necessary to take advantage of a tool even after making a fairly significant investment in the tool.

However, there is an exponentially higher risk when no investment has been made. No one in the organization is saying, “we invested all of this money in the tool and we are not taking advantage of it,” because there was no investment.  In fact, to most it would seem almost ridiculous to suggest that a company should hire someone full-time to analyze data derived from Google Analytics.

Yet more and more firms are adding full-time analysts to their web optimization teams because they recognize the dividends it pays. Unfortunately many companies are now asking, “can’t we get as much from Google Analytics for free instead of paying for our current tool” instead of asking “shouldn’t we be doing more and better analysis to gain actionable insights from our current tool?”

I believe this is by far the most significant hidden cost of Google Analytics and it has nothing to do with the quality of the tool.