Today I was sitting down with a client of ours, explaining how the Pearl ecommerce search works. It’s essential that your customers can find what they need within a few seconds of arriving at your website, otherwise they will quickly lose attention and go elsewhere. This short article explains how you can track customer searches once they reach your site and how to take appropriate action, to serve them up the products they are looking for.

You’ll need to have a Google Analytics account set up and connected to your Pearl account. It’s free, and very handy. This is how to set it up. Also make sure you have the SEARCH widget in place on your website of course!

Before we start, we’ll need to collect some information. What are people searching for? Do they find it in your site? We’ll use Google’s Site search feature to find out:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics account.
2. Click ‘Edit’ in the Website Profiles summary box for the profile you would like to enable Site Search for.
3. Click ‘Edit’ from the ‘Main Website Profile Information’ section of the Profile Settings page.
4. Select the ‘Do Track Site Search’ radio button in the Site Search section of the Edit Profile Information page.
5. Enter your ‘Query Parameter’ in the field provided. This is “keywords” for a Pearl ecommerce website.
6. Choose for Google Analytics to strip out the query parameter from your URL.
7. Save changes!

Over the next few days you’ll see the results come through in the “Site search” section of the Google Analytics reporting, which is under the “Content” menu item on the left hand side.

Google Sitesearch

Once you’ve established what people are searching for, you need to see if these searches bring up expected results. You know your product set better than anyone, so plug these searches back into the  search box on your site to see what comes up.

Pearl will display all items where your search query appears in either the product name, or the meta keywords. You can use the keywords to tweak what appears.  So for example, if a visitor is searching for “Billabong shirts” but all your items are “Billabong T-shirt, Medium Red” for example, then they won’t appear in the search results. It’s an exact match. Sometimes our clients say “make it more intelligent” but the algorithms required vary massively depending on the number and type of items in your store, so we let you decide using the keywords.

Once you’ve got the hang of what to do, you can bulk upload keywords for products using the Data manager (use a 2 column file, Product ID/SKU in column A, and keywords in column B, separated by a comma), which will make the job quick and simple. Don’t overdo it by loading hundreds of useless keywords in.

Happy searching!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 3rd, 2010 at 9:51 pm and is filed under E-commerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.