There are two and only two things you will get from
internal site search.
Two important things.
And the first thing you will get is customer intent.
This is really, really, really, really, really hard
for you to get from your clickstream data, because you
have all the clicks and pages and all of that wonderful
keyword stuff, but it's really hard for you to understand
intent, why am I here?
I think internal search is great because
it shares that intent.
The customer is actually coming in and typing the
keyword and telling you what they're looking for.
The other reason internal site search analysis is very
important is to understand the navigational efficiency of
your website.
Remember, people are entering your website in
many different places.
If the landing page has the right call to action, the
right piece of content, they probably
wouldn't need to search.
So by analyzing your internal search data, you can actually
understand how good the landing pages are.
You can understand how good your fancy flyouts.
You can understand how good your header is, your left nav.
I don't remember the last time I looked at anything on the
homepage of amazon.com.
I land on the site, I search.
All that valuable dancing monkeys they have in the
middle of the page completely wasted on me.
Is that happening on your website?
You can do obvious reporting now.
I call this obvious reporting.
How many people are using the internal site
feature on your website?
Very important to know, very obvious.
Usually, it falls between 10% and 25%.
Little bit more for Amazon, I'm sure.
So first thing you want to know, how many?
Is this important?
Should I buy the Google Search Appliance or whatever else
Google is selling?
The next obvious thing you want to know are what keywords
do people search on, right?
Here are the top keywords, here are how many searches.
Very important to know.
And the next thing you'll want to know is for particular
term, my favorite, bounce rate.
You want to know the entire story.
You want to know how many people are searching for it,
how many were unique, how many exits.
You can PDF this, you can send this to your boss, and you
have a complete story.
Now you know how many people are using the feature, what
are the top search keywords that people are typing into
your internal search engine, and you can actually drill
down to a particular keyword and understand
the complete story.
This is the start of the game.
It goes up from here.
If you know what are the top 10 internal keyword terms on
your website, you've just suited up and
coming to the stadium.
The Super Bowl has not even started.
It starts now.
But starts by you understanding where people
search on your website.
So this is a report that is showing where the search
feature is being used in terms of the top 10
pages on the website.
This is very cool, because you could just go to the top four
or five pages, that's pretty big, and you can see what is
actually going on in the pages that
requires people to search.
It's very, very nice.
And the thing you can do is this new metric that has been
created called search depth.
For each of the pages where people search, you can
actually measure the number of pages people see after they
have done the search.
So you can go back and figure out if it is a good thing for
your website that people search and then look more, or
on your website, this internal search engine stinks.
So people [? keep ?] searching, searching,
searching, searching, searching.
But it allows you to get that data so you can understand
where do people start searching from and what are
they doing after that.
Weird stuff.
My hypothesis is there is absolutely, positively no
feature on your website, none, that gets used as much as
internal search.
Your header, your left nav, footer, main body,
promos on the right.
None of them will get used 10% of the time.
And site search is used probably much more
than 10% of the time.
That is why this is very, very important for you.
But the other thing is that Google [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
was very kind to build in the bounce rate
feature here as well.
You want to know the quality of the search results from
your internal search engine.
Are they actually giving your visitors relevant data?
Here are the terms that are being searched
for these many times.
These many people leave from the results page right away.
They search, they look at your crappy
results, and they're gone.
I think I can say crappy after looking at these numbers.
Imagine the opportunity lost, because people came to your
website, they went through the trouble of actually looking
for specifically why they were there, and approximately 80%
of the time, they leave after looking at the results page.
So now you know exactly what you need to go fix.
You know the key terms, you can go fix them.
Exactly the same view, I just applied the standard cut.
The other one that I'm a big fan of.
I stress this a lot in my book.
I'll write about this a lot in my blog, is I love outcomes.
If all of you have not created goals in Google Analytics, or
Omniture, [? Website ?]
[? Story, ?] whatever you're using, if you've not created
goals and if you're not measuring goals, then really
just screwing around.
Outcomes is the answer to the question why does
your website exist?
Not in a Ph.D. thesis, 15 words or less.
And the nice thing now is in Google Analytics for your
internal site search, your outcomes are right there.
Conversion, e-commerce.
So you can actually look and see if you just spend $100,000
buying an internal search box from [? Indacta ?]
or someone else.
Was that investment worth it?
So you can click on a button and get that.
You can say what is the conversion rate of people who
do search internally and those who don't?
Now, I actually did not cook up these numbers to make them
look dramatic, but this is a very dramatic difference.
On your website, my hypothesis, this number would
probably [UNINTELLIGIBLE] over here.
This is very dramatic difference, it's a great site.
I'm sure they love the internal search.
It's just massively beautiful delta.
Your website, probably it's over here, right?
Compared to probably five, seven, eight points higher if
you actually have a good internal search engine.
This is how you can get money.
You can go tell your CEO, you can go tell your boss, you can
go tell them, look, you invested money in the internal
search engine, this is exactly how much it's adding to the
bottom line.
There are very few things you'll do on your site that
will have this kind of a dramatic impact.
The other nice, new feature I think Brett touched on just a
little bit earlier today is that increasingly in Google
Analytics, you'll see that there is no assumption on how
data smart you are or how much we will expect you to be
pre-intelligent before you use the data.
I really do like this new sort of data navigation feature.
We spend hours and hours trying to figure out what are
the most interesting questions that you need answers to.
And we'll build them right into the reports.
So you don't have to know anything about any of this,
you don't have to know anything about anything I've
shown before.
We assume absolutely zero, flat ground, base line.
And yet, you can log into the tool, find the question that
you need answered, click on it, and find the answer.
It's a completely new way of navigating the data.
Now, these links go to some of the reports that I have shown
you before, but you don't need to dig and hunt and beg to
find them in your tool You simply go in, find the
question you need answered, boom.