“The 5th Element” is a large Belorussian online store of household appliances and electronics. More than 80,000 users visit this resource every day. It is not surprising that its marketers thought about improving the performance of the search bar.
In November 2019, the smart search was integrated on The 5th element's site. During 10 months of the Multisearch work, the percentage of conversions increased by 28%.
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Conversion from the search box before the integration: 2.32% (31.12.18-31.10.19)
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The conversion from the search box after integration: 3,72% (01.11.19 - 31.08.20)
“We tried to solve the search problems on our own for about a year, and then we found Multisearch.”
Deputy Head of Operational Sales Department of “The 5th element” online store.
We tried to solve the search problems on our own for about a year. Our search box had a number of problems starting from low relevance of the output items and ending with its problems to understand the queries on a different keyboard layout, words with transliteration and typos.
After a year of trying to create our own search, we found out a ready-made solution — Multisearch. After the smart search integration, the conversion rate for the segment of users who use the search on the site had increased. The search bar has begun to understand all the errors and to guess user requests.
Search analytics from Multisearch helps a lot. Thanks to the statistics of non-founded queries we can track users' expectations regarding our product range, be aware of market trends, and adjust the search results according to requests.
What was done by Multisearch?
In October 2019 “The 5th Element” marketers had contacted Multisearch, and on the 1st of November, had started a trial of the smart search on the site. A week after the end of testing, the company signed a cooperation agreement for a year.
The search was installed through the plugin. After integration, the search box was able to:
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understand errors and typos;
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recognize language features — gender, case, morphology;
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understand the Latin-Cyrillic transliteration and vice versa;
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understand mistakes caused by wrong keyboard layout;
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filter products by category and brand;
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search by products, promotions, articles, etc.;
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understand multiple languages;
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learn the synonyms;
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adapt to different devices;
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show users the request history.
“The 5th element” also can use the features of the Ecommerce package. We update the site information once an hour.
Here what Multisearch had done additionally during the test period:
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removed kopecks in the output, set up rounding;
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adjusted the results according to different requests, for example, “joystick”, “washer/washing machine”;
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set up the work with text on touch screens via a virtual keyboard;
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added the parend_id attribute to the upload;
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indicated that the product belongs to several categories;
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set up the transition for definite search queries, for example, "smartphone" "LENOVO laptop", "Washing machine with vertical loading" into non-indexed search output pages. In this case, it is more effective to land on the category/brand/filter/product page. In such a case, increases the number of page views in the catalog, but not inside the non-indexed pages of the search output.
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added recommended products on the “nothing found" page. For example, there is a search term "Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 3/32GB Twilight Gold" — this product in such a color is out of stock. These are available: "Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 3/32GB space black" and "Xiaomi Redmi Note 7 3GB/32GB Neptune Blue", respectively considering the similarity of its characteristics they will be also displayed on this search query.
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did an additional ranking of results using the tag <ordering>2 / </ordering> in the data feed: the closer to 1 — the higher the product or category.
Also, we have recommended the site's marketers to add to the data feed product's characteristics and products with the "Out of stock" status.
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The characteristics are necessary in case of such search requests as “camp-cots”, to find the desired product. Due to the lack of such characteristics, the search could not display all the products correctly.
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Displaying "Out of stock" status products affects the conversion rate. If you do not take into account such products, the user won't find what he was looking for and will leave the site. If the results display, the customer will be able to go to similar products or contact the sales department to clarify the date of availability of the product.
After the search integration, the percentage of undiscovered requests per month was 11%. In most cases, non-founded requests include products that are not in the site's assortment. It helps “The 5th element” marketers understand what positions they need to add to the range and track the expectations of users.
Analytics: the share of search traffic is less than 10%, but it brings a third of all sales
Let's consider the GA reports, where we compare the periods without abnormal traffic spikes on holidays (Black Friday and New Year): the period before installing Multisearch 01.09.2019-31.10.2019, and after it’s installing 01.01.2020 - 01.03.2020.
We should note that previously before the Multisearch integration GA reports included queries without search results. But all search queries from the smart search plugin in GA reports — are clicks/transitions on a product or category from the search.
The screenshot shows that during the plugin's operation period it was for 20% more sessions on the site but, for example, the number of transactions from the search increased by almost 40%, and from sessions without search — only by 15%. This indicates both: the quality of the audience and the improvement of the search output relevance. The transaction rate even more clearly indicates this. It increased from search bar by 20%, while in the rest of the traffic it fell down by 4%. Session value (average transaction value) from the search field also increased by 11% while the rest of the traffic fell by almost 15%.
Many stores use SERP links in advertising in order to rank their site higher for low search volume keywords. But these links are not always relevant. For example, a user goes to the site for the query "apple 15 laptops", and the link leads him to the search results, where all apple laptops are displaying without a screen size filter. Therefore, we consider the quality of search at the page level, excluding paid traffic from sources leading directly to search results. We exclude it because in this case, it is not the search box responsible for the relevance of the query, but the PPC specialist.
We can see on already filtered data, that the conversion rate increased by 46.38% and the session value increased by 33.65%, revenue — by 29.7%.
These indicators show us that the quality of the search directly affects the conversion. A significant proportion of transactions are made by this segment. This example shows us that the share of traffic from the search on the site is less than 10% and at the same time it brings a third of all sales.
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