As powerful and important as web analytics is, web analysis can often hinder rather than help a web site or business improve. While analytics data is fine for telling you the “what” but not the “why” — so beware of using metrics to make assumptions about your customer behavior, preferences or your site’s performance.

Consider this situation. Retailer sees that the site search box is rarely - if ever - used. Retailer concludes “Our customer doesn’t use search. We don’t need to worry about site search optimization because nobody uses it anyway.” Now efforts to improve searchandizing (the way you merchandize products in search results), personalization based on search behavior and improving site search usability become low priority or are disregarded altogether.

Suppose the “why” is the site design has camouflaged the search box. It’s just not where folks expect it, or it’s too subtle:

Examples:

In this case, a retailer could tweak the design, and revisit site search stats 1 one to 3 months’ time to see if there’s a difference. This doesn’t have to be split-tested — you could simply measure the before and after.

Of course, it may be a good idea to test different search box sizes, designs and placements using a website optimization tool like Google Website Optimizer, Omniture Test and Target or Sitespect.

The search box scenario is only one example. This could easily apply to any design element/feature of your site that you conclude does not get used because of lack of customer interest. If any of the following’s use is below what you would expect for your site, investigate “why” and ask yourself if design or usability is to blame:

• Search box
• Navigation menus (top, sidebar, footer, filtered navigation, visual navigation/AJAX menus etc)
• Contact us forms (link hidden? form design problems?)
• Live chat (interrupt too soon? link hidden?)
• FAQ (customer service constantly answering questions already addressed on your website?
• Wishlist (do you require registration?)
• Cross-sell/upsell (too much choice? not enough choice? irrelevant suggestions?)
• Gift finder (buried in site? difficult to use?)
• Email/newsletter signup (do you show a privacy statement? do you ask for too much information? is the link buried?)
• Customer review participation (is the process difficult? what are the incentives?)
• Customer feedback (is the link easy to spot? are your surveys too long?)

It helps to start with an expectation/goal/industry benchmark of what you expect usage of various features on your site to be. Then look for the “what” in your analytics. If they’re way off from what you expect, think about the adjustments/tests/surveys/fixes you need to improve them.

What if 68% of your site visitors only came to research an offline purchase?

According to research by Accenture:

• 68% compare prices online before shopping in a physical store
• 58% locate items online before purchasing offline
• 67% prefer to research online and buy from physical stores

Just for fun, let’s call web shoppers with a high propensity to research online and purchase offline “ROPO” customers (a noun and a verb). Reasons to ROPO include:

• Shopper wants to view the item up close
• Shopper needs the item sooner than it can ship
• Shopper wants to avoid shipping fees
• Shopper might not be comfortable sharing personal information online

Like the 4 buying modalities, a customer may be generally a ROPO (prefers to research online and purchase offline most of the time), or more likely to ROPO based on the purchase situation (e.g. received gift card from Target for Christmas, hate wandering the aisles on a busy Saturday - research online, walk in, walk out).

Improving Search for ROPOs

I spotted Target targeting ROPOs in category and search results the other day:

This offers a higher level of customer service to ROPOs than just providing store lookup on the product page — the ROPO can scan search results and only view details on items they can pick up in-store.

Target shows you locations, hours of operation and a telephone number, sort by distance (not sure how helpful this is if you don’t live at the center-point) and low or normal availability. You can also view a map and print the page in regular or map view.

Move Closer to “Bulls-Eye”

To make this even more helpful, I’d like to see is a zipcode or city-based filter where you could define your location, and see only products available in-store locally.

I’d also like to see a button or icon that differs from the add to cart button (to facilitate scanning if you don’t use a filter) - change the size, color and shape.

Another idea to help ROPO is to use a personalization tool like Sitebrand’s Geo-IP detection to sniff out visitors from areas you have a local presence. Show these visitors custom content throughout the site with a link to your store locator or inventory lookup.

Have you seen any other e-tailer examples of how to aid ROPOs?

Google Trends is just one of the nifty tools the Big G hath bestowed upon the Internet marketing community. Basically to type in keywords to compare their search volumes against each other over time. There’s also a “what’s hot” element, each day there’s a list of “Today’s Hot Trends.” Some of them are really hard to believe that they are remotely search-worthy, but clicking on a keyword will show

But I digress…Back to the Hack!

If you run separate online stores for different countries, you need to understand that sometimes a couch is a chesterfield, sneakers are trainers, french fries are chips, and candy bars are chocolate bars. Google Trends lets you enter a number of variations of keywords that essentially describe the same product and figure out which countries use which term more often.

Example 1:

“flash drive” vs. “USB drive” vs. “memory stick”

Continue Reading:
Hack Week Part 2 - Using Google Trends for International Search Marketing »

Last week Justin Palmer posted 11 Ways to Optimize Your Site Search while Ann Smarty posted a roundup of free keyword research tools over at YouMoz.

One of the tools Ann mentioned was MSN AdCenter’s Keyword Mutation Tool. Despite its grotesque moniker, it’s a great for optimizing internal site search. You don’t have to be an MSN advertiser to use it, either.

Basically, what this tool does is generate common keyword misspellings for you. So instead of trying to forecast them yourself, or waiting until someone types these errors in your search box and gets a “results not found,” you can adjust your internal search to include these possibilities.

It takes some playing around with though, for example I got no results for “appliance” but a few for “appliances”:

You’ll also want to manually test these misspellings to make sure they work (for your most popular or important items / keywords). If your ecommerce software search function uses fuzzy logic, your search should be able to recognize variations of keywords. But it’s always worth a spot-check for your critical terms.

Google Analytics recently introduced an internal site search feature to its already kick-ass free stats program — aptly named “Site Search.”

This tool works with your existing site search and is invaluable to ecommerce marketers as it gives you so much insight into customer intent and your website’s success at delivering results. For example, you can use search log data to discover:

• What keywords people search for - what’s hot and what do they want that you don’t carry
• What search refinements are made, indicating possible “Results Not Found” messages or unsatisfactory results
• What pages the searches were made from, and where users clicked to

The next 30 days is when this information will be crucial. Customers can’t buy what they can’t find. Maybe you only use the term “notebook computer case” and your customers search for “laptop bags.” You can tweak your product pages and search engine for the various ways customers describe your product until the right pages show up when you test your site.

Continue Reading:
Why You Should Turn On Google Analytics Site Search Today »