About Ravi Pathak Its been long since I wrote a blog post, but It just becomes even more crazier day by day. I pushed myself hard to write and will get into the grove of writing more.
On Site Search - How it Works?
I just delved into internal site search usage this time. For those who are novice, it is a small search text box within your website, which a visitor can use (via search in a site) when trying to find something straight without delving into navigations. My purpose of analysis here was to do evaluate how internal site search as a website tool doing and is it producing desired results as expected by website marketer. So, I had Google analytics configured in a way that tracks site search so that was easy. Next step was to see very basic report as below.
See about 13.53% visits are with site search that means about 1,652 out of total 12,210 visits uses site search. Simple huh! Now let’s see how much it valuable is. See the screen shot for the internal website search usage report below in Google analytics.
The metric you use is per visit value. That is if yours is an e commerce website, the value of that metric is a ratio of total revenue generated from the visits with (or without) site search divided by visits for those respective site search statuses. What it basically tells us is , those visits which uses site search produces about 10 times revenue for every visit than normal other visits without web site search. Bang! You don’t need rocket science now to do more analysis from here. Still let’s see some more. A straight thought to me is one should do multivariate testing for the placement of site search. Anyways so, our summary till now is about 14% visits uses site search and every visit which uses site search produces about $31 for the website. Mind that this is about 10 times than the visits that are not using site search so every visitor that comes to the site and searches becomes 10 times more valuable for you. Let’s see how our search function is filtering in people.
Web Site Search Analysis
Going back to the original first screen shot it appears that there are about 23.04% search exits. This means that for every 100, 23 visits are lost because they didn’t get anything from your website. So, basically, your lost for this given time duration is = % search Exits X visits using site search X per visit value = 23% X 1,652 X $31 = $ 11,800 Rings bell ? Yes, I know, you can avoid all the search exits, agree completely. So, you are not going to recover all of $11,800 always, but how much can you recover?
Now, this gives you a nice idea of how your current onsite search engine is doing. If it is ordinary and you think that it should give more result, then you can go for Google’s custom search and try and see if it decreases your search exits. It should be noted here that the search results doesn’t merely depend on the type of search engine that you have on site, however if you see lot of internal site search keywords that are letting people to exit, you should focus on building content so that user doesn’t get drop.
