Using site search to get more out of paid search
One emerging aspect of site search functionality is that marketers are using it as a strategic tool rather than just a list of links to products. “A number of retailer customers are using our technology to increase the effectiveness of their paid search spending,” reports Tony Frazier, senior vice president of marketing at site search and navigation technology provider iPhrase Technologies Inc.
Thexton.com.au, an Australia-based online marketer of health and nutritional supplements, has doubled its conversion rate off paid search by using iPhrase’s site search engine, OneStep, to power the creation of dynamically generated landing pages. A big advertiser on Google and Overture, Thexton passes the paid keyword that caused the visitor to click through to its site directly to the iPhrase engine. The engine, which incorporates natural language processing, pulls the associated products from product descriptions in Thexton’s electronic catalog and delivers a page that shows the most relevant products and a shopping cart link to buy them right on the page.
Instead of search that leads to a static, existing page, the engine dynamically populates what is in effect a custom page with the products most relevant to the keyword. The strategy has doubled Thexton’s conversions off paid search to 6% from 3% over the past several months, says Frazier.
Using site search to dynamically power landing pages delivers relevant product links and saves time and labor on the back end, Frazier says. “One of the challenges with web search is that if you take people to static landing pages, you have to do a lot of work to those landing pages to make sure they are optimized to the particular keyword that brought them to the page, or you risk low conversion rates,” he says. “That has cost and overhead associated with it.”
Leveraging site search for landing pages helps cut that cost because it produces a page that mimics one a visitor would find by navigating through the site, but instead of requiring the retailer’s IT department to create the page, the technology does it dynamically by consulting site content via queries in real time, Frazier says. “You are not having to write custom code to pull it all together,” he adds.
Other iPhrase customers are piloting similar approaches. iPhrase will roll learnings from these pilots and other strategic applications of site search into OneStep Commerce, to launch in April. It’s a solutions offering on top of its existing platform—which also gets an update at that time—that incorporates conversion reports from web analytics provider Coremetrics Inc. A hosted version will be available as a web service under a partnership with web design and production firm Tellus Interactive.
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