Site Search As Key Performance Indicator

Do you know what’s happening in your own site search? Understanding site search is one of the most important KPI (Key Performance Indicator) you should measure. According to a Forrester study, over 50 percent of major web sites fail in search usability. When your search fails to deliver, your conversion suffers. A low converting site will result is less sales and decreased revenue. Search is not just another nice feature to have. You have to think of search as a revenue generating part of your business.

Your company works hard to drive traffic to your site. Many visitors will use your on site search instead of browsing through your site. Online shoppers want to use site search to expedite the shopping experience. The faster and easier they can locate the product they are looking for the more likely they’ll buy on your site. The more roadblock you set in place to inconvenience the shopper, the more likely they’ll buy from someone else.

Do you know what they are searching for? Are you in any way measuring what search phrases are queried on your site? It is not enough to have site search as a feature. You must analyze it. You have to understand it. Then, you have to make adjustments based on your findings.

The best place to start learning about your site search is through the search log files. If you don’t monitor your log files, you will fail to gain an insight into what your customers are looking for on your site. Understanding site search is a KPI that should be part of your tactical operations. Learning about site search will tell you what your customers are looking for.

In addition to understanding what site visitors are searching for, you have to test what results yield from searches. For example, if your customers are searching for “return policy” what results are they shown? Are the search results relevant to the search queries? If the result you get is not the best possible result, you have to tweak you search engine. The top few results must be relevant, because searchers are not interested in reading deep down your search results. Result number 10 is infinitely more irrelevant than result number 1.

Every reasonable search phrase should result in relevant search results. For example, if the site searcher types “return policy” in the search field, the search should result in some result. Every e-commerce site should have a return policy; therefore, the site search should yield the relevant result. One of the worst possible outcomes for a search query would be no result. If a user types any relevant key phrase, it should result in relevant results. If they don’t, your search is failing your customers.

Site search is a tool to enhance customer satisfaction. If it works as it is supposed to, it has done its job. If site search fails it becomes a frustrating experience instead of a positive experience resulting in lower conversion rates, lost sales opportunities, loss of revenue and unhappy site visitors.

Making Your Business Click

The lifeline of most businesses rely heavily on the amount of marketing support can be supplied. There is no doubt that marketing collateral in the form of establishing identity and brand existence are key factors in helping make businesses known. These marketing collaterals can be likened to arming the key personnel in a business such as business cards, flyers, brochures and multimedia material to be able to provide the necessary information and image that a company wants to project.

Marketing collateral does not have to be high cost in nature. Resourcefulness and innovation of the company through its current roster of personnel can help ignite and produce the necessary collaterals a business can lean on. Understandably, cost and expenses are two of the things that business owners are not too keen on hearing. But the supplement of expected outcomes from the investment of marketing collaterals through advertising and promotions will provide a better overview of what to results to expect from such programmed marketing efforts by assigned people of the company.

The hardest part of establishing a business is to spread the word that such a company and its products or services are indeed available. The success of a business lies heavily in providing the necessary information of the existence of such, the purpose of which is to try and penetrate a market properly.

To start things off, the need for proper product or service orientation should be established. Consumers will not immediately rely on mere image and word of mouth. This is the job that is tasked for most marketing executives, to build on the product and make the consumers understand the benefits and fruits that the product brings. This is best done through the use of supporting promotional materials in the form of flyers, posters, and TV commercials if costs are permitted. Making such mediums available to consumers in the easiest way possible for them to get acquainted with the product being pushed is the best way to kick off a product’s existence in the market.

After a successful product orientation towards the target market that a company has focused on, the next thing to handle is the places where the product will be available. Supermarkets, department stores, convenience stores, and specialty shops, the mode of availability will be the critical aspect since this will largely depend if the product is readily available. For sure, people will not go out of their way to exert much effort in finding where the product may be. Thus it is the task of the business personnel to make sure that all possible distribution channels are covered, with the target market class under consideration as well. While flyers and posters may be spread all throughout affiliated stores and outlets, it is still the best practice to make sure that the product itself is available in target modes of distribution.

The set price for most consumer goods and commodities today play an important role in enticing consumer demand. While this is more psychological in nature, it cannot be discounted that business executives must determine an acceptable price to jack up their sales and consumer patronization. Pricing has its share of conflicts. Low prices may carry with it low quality product tags, while higher priced goods may push customers to look for alternative products. This is why it is essential that research and development teams must prepare a good comparison of product availability before finally deciding on a set price. The price should also consider the usual costs such as the administrative and operations cost, mark-ups and other related costs for manufacturing the product. The marketing collaterals will also fall under the administrative and operations cost, usually under the advertising and promotions part.

Defining the target market area as well as the consumer class will help determine the degree of saturation in the market a business should aim for. Identifying where the target market class resides or stays in is a good way to help in trimming down the area needed for saturation. Focusing the marketing collaterals in the area where the identified consumer class is situated is a good way to establish identity in the area. This should be a good way to start in effectively covering key areas for segregation prior to aiming for a larger market share.

The attention, complaints and distribution of the product or service still lied in the hands of the people hired to do the life blood of the company. Similar to a soldier going off to war, providing the sales force with business cards, marketing portfolios and other marketing paraphernalia is the best way to make an impact. Other than motivating the sales people to bring in the sales, making sure that they have the necessary materials to show are mirror-like images of the company. They represent the company and whatever they project speaks entirely for the business venture.

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