Top 4 Percent Of Searches make Up 50% Of All Searc

  1. Home
  2. News
  3. Top 4 Percent Of Searches make Up 50% Of All Searc
Top 4 Percent Of Searches make Up 50% Of All Searc
San Diego, CA, June 12, 2006--WebSideStory, Inc., a provider of on-demand digital marketing and real-time enterprise analytics solutions, today announced the results of a new study that suggests marketers can significantly improve their web site search results by focusing on the ‘popular top’ – those few hundred unique search terms that comprise about half of all web site queries. In an analysis of millions of web site searches, WebSideStory found that 4 percent of all unique search queries comprised about 50 percent of all searches on a web site. For e-commerce sites, the figure dropped to just 2 percent of all unique queries, according to the April 2006 study, which examined 34 million search phrases on more than 40 web sites using either WebSideStory Search, an award-winning site search solution, or HBX Analytics, an award-winning web analytics solution. WebSideStory supplied the data for a new Patricia Seybold Group white paper on the strategic benefits of site search. Entitled “The Other Search: Making the Most of Site Search to Optimize the Total Customer Experience,” the white paper is available free of charge at http://www.websidestory.com/othersearch. “This data demonstrates that you have opportunities to influence your visitors outside of the navigation experience,” writes Susan Aldrich, the report’s author and a senior vice president and senior consultant at the Patricia Seybold Group. “Think about how much time you spend creating and implementing your navigational structure and about the results of that effort. This data tells us that you can get significant results by spending time on optimizing your site search results.” Aldrich’s paper discusses how online marketers are missing a big opportunity if they only focus on search engine marketing – the process of acquiring traffic through pay-per-click networks such as Google or Yahoo. Once visitors arrive at a site, Aldrich says few applications are more effective at converting customers and improving the overall visitor experience than site search. “The site search box itself is a tremendous gift to you from your customers: they are telling you exactly what they want, in their own words,” writes Aldrich, who also provides a five-step plan for getting the most out of customer visits. The ‘Other Search’ report also provides Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and other metrics from the WebSideStory Index, a compilation of e-commerce, site search and global Internet user trends. Additional site search metrics include: • Visitors who use the site search application on a web site are nearly three times as likely to convert than the average site visitor • One and two-word queries comprise 83 percent of all site searches. Among e-commerce sites, this measure rose to 91 percent • Nearly 12 percent of all site searches led to zero results. Among e-commerce sites, this figure was 8.5 percent “As our many customers know, site search is much more than a search box on your web site – it’s a highly strategic business application that can drive significant improvements in conversions, sales and customer retention rates,” said Steve Kusmer, senior vice president and general manager of WebSideStory’s Search & Content Solutions division. “We are pleased to collaborate with the Patricia Seybold Group on this insightful research paper.”