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- 7 Ways to make web analytics work better in companies
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- Web analytics winners and losers? It’s the people that make the difference.
- Simple segmentation for your website and better web analytics understanding
- Web Analytics Wednesday in London – the future of web analytics
- Digital cream: revealing debating at econsultancy’s marketing event
- Google Analytics Tip: Ecommerce tracking set up, screenshots and why it’s useful
- Reliving my customer’s experience and some nice screenshots
- Internal site search part 2
- The best charts ever and food for thought for us web analysts
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My Blogger Friends
I’ve just got back from 10 days holiday in a farm 5 hours drive from London, with plenty of hens, goats, horses, ducks, rabbits, cows and sheep (toddler paradise really – well my toddler thought so anyway) but no internet access. So please excuse the tardiness of, this, my third post!
For today’s post, I’ll focus on understanding better how internal search works and how important it is that it works effectively so that you don’t end up losing business and visitors and sending them on a galaxy quest. We don’t want our visitors to be wondering how to get to what they want or if they are there yet. The Eisenberg brothers tll us that 50% oif nternal searches result in a failed search which is a considerable number of dissatified visitors and customers to your site. So, this really is of crucial importance if you want to improve site experience and ultimately the effectiveness of your site and turning visitors into customers.
Internal search refers to the keywords that people use while exploring your site (not the keywords they use on the search engines such as Google).
For many websites, in particular holidays, recruitment, publishing and large retailers, internal search can be the most important and used feature on the website and can account for 50% of all pageviews on the site. Obviously, that isn’t the case for all sites as small sites don’t need or have internal search in most cases (so we’ll ignore these today).
In order to be able to analyse internal search keywords at all, you’ll need a paid-for analytics solutions – though not necessarily an expensive one, as both Clicktracks and Indextools can combine internal search parameters with visitor segments. Google Analytics does not currently provide any data at all on internal search keywords (don’t be confused with the “keywords” heading under traffic sources, these are the words visitors used on search engines to arrive at your site).
How do we assess how well (or not) internal search is working?
1. What do people search for and do any keywords stand out?
2. What searches results in failed searches and what proportion are failed searches?
3. Let’s do some segmenting
1. What do people search for?
Rather than getting too bogged down with the exact words and words and common misspellings that visitors use (although interesting and at times surprising), it is better to start with much broader strokes and then drill down and do segmenting later. By which I mean, how many visitors as a percentage of all visitors to your site use internal search and which are the most and least popular keywords over a representative time period, 2 months for example.
If for example, less than 1% of visitors use internal search and this is large recruitment site, then make sure that search button is placed in an intuitive and easy to find place for visitors. If the internal search area was moved, would it make a difference to the number of visitors who search? On the other side of the scale, if for example too many visitors (over 10% – it really does depend on the site) are searching on the site, then your site’s products and/or services are not easy enough to find on the site.
If the most popular keyword search is a noticable percentage of all searches, then this clearly signals that this should be clearly displayed on the site or on a site navigation bar. If a popular keyword is not even an item or service offered by your site, this is a clear signal that this should be something you either should be offering or linking up with someone who does (affiliate marketing perhaps?). Again, this seems simplistic but it is so easy not to notice how important popular keyword searches can be! When internal search is working effectively, we should not expect to see any one search keyword as a noticable proportion of the total – expect to see more of a long, long tail (lots and lots and lots of different slightly obscure keyword searches).
Here is how to get your long tail of internal search keywords:
First, create a report of all the internal search keywords and unique visits for a 2 month period and upload to excel. Grab all the keywords and visits into smoothed line chart with data points (so that you can easily see the keywords that stand out). See my chart below:
Then try making a list of the keywords that stand out. These are words that need to be looked at carefully as they will be benefit from being presented on the site in an easy to find way so that your visitors do not always need to search for them.
2. Which searches result in failed searches
A failed search is when a visitor doesn’t find what they are looking for. For example, keyword searches on products or services that you do not offer would be a failed search as would a time sensitive product or service that is not available within the results of the keyword search made. For example, visitors that click on the back button after making a search would be classified as failed/frustrated searchers. To reduce failed searches make sure the site reflects at the minimum easy to find information on the more significant failed search keywords (this is just a quick fix and not the solution if only information is presented but is a needed first step until a good solution is found).
Then look at the percentage of all visitors that have a failed search. In addition, you can create a visitor segment where the search results page is also the exit page and compare this against all failed searches to see how many “failed search” visitors, leave the site immediately.
3. Then we segment, to confirm our suspicions and insights
Assuming we are using an analytics solution where we can label visitors segments with specific keyword searches, we begin to drill-down further. If on a recruitment agency site, a noticable search is for “web analyst”, we can see which were the most popular pages they visited before searching. From this, we could learn that they visited the “marketing jobs” page and the “Web jobs” page and as a result of not being to find what they were looking for, searched for the term “web analyst” and subsequently left the site. Therefore, it would appear that both of these jobs page would benefit from having information about web analyst jobs on them (until the recruitment site started posting web analyst jobs that is).
We can segment against new versus returning visitors, time spent on site, by navigation path etc. For example, we can see how these visitors came to the site in the first place by looking at search engine keywords. If there is a noticable percentage of visitors who arrived at the site after having searched for “analyst job” or “web analyst job” on search engines, then it is clear that the hopes and desires of visitors coming in from the search engines is not being met by the site – as well as a PPC (pay per click) overspend on keywords that are resulting in a high number of failed searches and exits from the site.
Some final thoughts – this really is all about marketing, effective marketing (Kotler anyone?).
The key is to reflect on the site what visitors are looking for, in a holistic and thorough way. Not just add-on a quick note on one of the pages that this site does not currently offer web analyst jobs (although in the short-term, a quick fix is better than nothing), but have a think about the big picture, what the site is trying to achieve and use this information about what visitors want and aren’t getting to improve and add to the service offering – in this case, widen the remit of the recruitment agency itself and add web analyst jobs to the site.
I really do (I promise) welcome your agreement, disagreement and opinions, so please do share some of your thoughts by commenting on this post.
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recent posts
- 7 Ways to make web analytics work better in companies
- Measuring social media, influence, debate, buzz monitoring
- Web analytics winners and losers? It’s the people that make the difference.
- Simple segmentation for your website and better web analytics understanding
- Web Analytics Wednesday in London – the future of web analytics
- Digital cream: revealing debating at econsultancy’s marketing event
- Google Analytics Tip: Ecommerce tracking set up, screenshots and why it’s useful
- Reliving my customer’s experience and some nice screenshots
- Internal site search part 2
- The best charts ever and food for thought for us web analysts
recent comments
- Perry Williams: Hello Dear, I am strongly agree with your point that the web analytics is associated with the social...
- Philip Sheldrake: Nice overview Marianina. I wanted to post a link to an article in Business Week from June about the...
- Luisa Woods: Hi Marianina, I think you make a very good point about the importance of segmentation. I like to carry...
- Eric T. Peterson: Marianina, Nice to have seen you Monday in London! I just got this post so perhaps something odd is...
- Marianina Manning: Hi Luisa, Thanks for your thought-provoking comment! I agree that new ways of looking at web...
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Web Analytics Princess by Marianina Chaplin
July 2 2007
I attending a conference on social networking last week. There are 6.8m myspace users in the UK and 2.7m on facebook, but they are convinced that facebooks will overtake myspace by the end of the year. Someone however questioned the quality of sites like myspace – he claimed to have registered as a “sheep”, and by the end of the week had 50 new friends!
July 4 2007
That’s a great insight! I believe “Segmentation” is the key in the entire analysis process.
thanks
anil
July 4 2007
Internal search is indeed a goldmine: it’s one of those rare opportunities to hear the voice of the visitor in their own words.
For any frustrated Google Analytics users who are prepared to set up a filter it may yet be possible to get at this data. If your web site passes the query string as a parameter like ?query= or ?txtsearch then you can use an advanced filter to extract this from the request URI and store it in the ‘user defined’ field. You can then segment by ‘user defined’ in many reports and see the search term. Only one per session, though, I believe. Jim Newsome was my original source for this.
There’s a thread about this on one of the Google groups:
http://groups.google.com/group/analytics-help-tracking/browse_thread/thread/6dfe9f5ea95f751f/6cf10d6d3761e915
Tim
July 4 2007
Ian,
Thanks for your comment. I believe you mean’t to comment on social networking post. You make a valid point – the hard thing with SNA is to find a way to filter out spammy messages/profiles so that one’s analysis of influence of comment flow etc is not skewed.
Anil,
Thanks for your comment and am glad that you found this post interesting. Segment, segment and then segment a bit more is my motto!!
Tim,
Thanks so much for an extremely useful addition to the blog post – this has really added value as I had no idea that it was possible to extract internal search keywords using google analytics. Using the custom filters to extract them should be done with care, so it would be worth setting up a test profile in google analytics to test out the advanced custom filters until they are working absolutely right.
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