General merchandise retailer Fingerhut expects to gain $1.1 million in incremental revenue within the first year of using new site analytics tools from Coremetrics Inc. that have identified non-functioning site search terms on Fingerhut.com, says Mike Sidders, director of e-commerce. The tools led to a 26% increase in the sales conversion rate after the first 15% of non-functioning search terms were fixed. “Extracting ROI is a slam-dunk,” he says.
Before implementing the tools, Fingerhut had suspected that many of its online visitors were abandoning its site after receiving no results from site searches, but didn’t know which terms–or how many searches on those terms–were failing to produce pages for visitors. “We knew on-site search was a problem, but had no way to quantify it,” Sidders says.
Fingerhut, a unit of Petters Group LLC, identified non-performing search terms with Coremetrics Retail Analyst, which it has used to develop a customized “failed search terms report.” The report provides a list of the search terms that produce zero results and gives the frequency of their use by visitors.
Fingerhut, using the report’s data along with its Coremetrics Online Analytics application, found that 55% of site searches produced no results. It also discovered that its site search engine was not capable of search “stemming,” which would allow searches on the word “bed,” for example, to also produce results related to the term “bedding.” In addition, the search engine was not capable of processing multiple variations of search terms, so that the term “pool” might produce two page links while “pools” would produce no results.
Fingerhut says that by fixing non-performing search terms to produce relevant pages, it has realized an immediate ROI of a 10% increase in revenue derived from search. “Within days of deploying our Coremetrics custom report, we gained outstanding actionable visibility that identified low-hanging-fruit opportunities right away,” Sidders says.
Back...
