Shoppers speak through the site search box, and e-retailers can profit by listening closely
The goal of improving its conversion rate is what drove cleaning and facility supplies retailer BettyMills.com to rethink its site navigation. The retailer discovered that consumers using its site search had a 100% better conversion rate than other site visitors. That meant that consumers browsing the site just using navigation tabs weren't finding what they were looking for, says Victor Hanna, the company's CEO, whose official title is Chief Betty.
Because the rest of the site was built in-house, fixing the problem would have required the retailer to manually revamp the product organization on its category pages. Instead the retailer decided to use Celebros' search results to populate those pages. "We figured that if search produces a better result, why not have every user effectively perform a search when they navigate the site?" The result was a 212% year-over-year increase in time on site in May, a 100% jump in conversion rate, and a 10% bump in average order value. "That is dramatic—those aren't small gains, those are huge gains," says Hanna.
Routing everything through search required Celebros to make some changes to ensure that the newly created pages would show up high in search engine results, he says. That included making the URLs for those pages intelligible to search engines. For example, when a consumer clicks on the link to the "brooms" category page the page's URL is "www.bettymills.com/shop/product/find/Brooms" rather than a long string of seemingly random symbols and letters. Search engines give more credence to pages whose URLs contain the terms that online shoppers use when they search.
With new products regularly coming in, reworking the search results to ensure that consumers are finding what they're looking for is an ongoing project for the retailer. "The number of moving parts is extraordinary," says Hanna. "We're constantly making changes to our inventory so we have to be on watch."
The Betty Mills Co. doesn't leave that task to one employee. All staff members are charged with alerting the merchandising team if a search produces an odd or unsatisfactory result, for instance, if a mop appeared at the top of a search for a "corn fill broom." If that happens the merchandising team tweaks the tagging on applicable products to improve results.
His merchandising team also analyzes the results from the most frequent queries to ensure the products displayed offer consumers what they're looking for. "I don't know if the technology exists that would really allow us to take our eyes off it," he says. That's why every day his team looks at metrics such as the site's most frequent queries to ensure quality search results.
Because the rest of the site was built in-house, fixing the problem would have required the retailer to manually revamp the product organization on its category pages. Instead the retailer decided to use Celebros' search results to populate those pages. "We figured that if search produces a better result, why not have every user effectively perform a search when they navigate the site?" The result was a 212% year-over-year increase in time on site in May, a 100% jump in conversion rate, and a 10% bump in average order value. "That is dramatic—those aren't small gains, those are huge gains," says Hanna.
Routing everything through search required Celebros to make some changes to ensure that the newly created pages would show up high in search engine results, he says. That included making the URLs for those pages intelligible to search engines. For example, when a consumer clicks on the link to the "brooms" category page the page's URL is "www.bettymills.com/shop/product/find/Brooms" rather than a long string of seemingly random symbols and letters. Search engines give more credence to pages whose URLs contain the terms that online shoppers use when they search.
With new products regularly coming in, reworking the search results to ensure that consumers are finding what they're looking for is an ongoing project for the retailer. "The number of moving parts is extraordinary," says Hanna. "We're constantly making changes to our inventory so we have to be on watch."
The Betty Mills Co. doesn't leave that task to one employee. All staff members are charged with alerting the merchandising team if a search produces an odd or unsatisfactory result, for instance, if a mop appeared at the top of a search for a "corn fill broom." If that happens the merchandising team tweaks the tagging on applicable products to improve results.
His merchandising team also analyzes the results from the most frequent queries to ensure the products displayed offer consumers what they're looking for. "I don't know if the technology exists that would really allow us to take our eyes off it," he says. That's why every day his team looks at metrics such as the site's most frequent queries to ensure quality search results.