Open

Overview

Open

The SEARCH / NAVI WPO is about offering relevant, self-learning, and personalized search on your web-site, both in the search result page and the search autocomplete (search preview while typing).

Purpose

Optimization of the search function, navigation, and listing of products and content.

• Optimized aspects:

• Search completion

• Product suggestions

• Content suggestions

• Search redirects

• Search results

• Semantic Filters

• Facets

• Content results

• Product listings

• Dynamic texts

Search completion

• Completely free choice of display

• Completion of popular or for you important search terms

• Blog articles with or without thumbnails

• Spelling error correction

• Automatic optimization of displayed elements and their order

Product suggestions

• Direct product recommendations in search completion

• Completely free choice of product display

• Automatic optimization of displayed products based on your goals, visitor profile, campaign, etc.

Content suggestions

• Direct recommendation of blog articles in search completion

• Completely free choice of display

• Automatic optimization of featured articles based on your goals, visitor profile, campaign, etc.

Search redirects

• Redirection of specific search terms to optimally designed landing pages.

• These can also be personalized and dynamic (layout, content)

• Higher relevance and demonstration of expertise

• Boxalino's reports show exactly for which terms this effort is worthwhile

Search results

• Free choice of display of search results

• Thanks to semantic filters, substantial reduction of "noise", i.e. irrelevant hits

• Instead of simple, often best-seller-driven sorting: automatically intelligent sorting based on various criteria of user behavior, your business goals, the campaigns, etc.

• Behavioral tracking, clicks, scrolling, which areas were viewed, etc.

• Calculation of specific metrics to optimize user experience and results ("Rising Stars", "Imposters" & "Orphans").

• Increase of individually perceived relevance and thus sales (Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Share of Wallet)

Semantic filters

• Semantic filters instead of full-text search only

• Substantially better search results, substantially reduced number of inappropriate results

• Only through this also really useful sorting function

• Extensively enhanced machine learning capabilities

• and much more

Facets

• Automatic selection of relevant facets

• Optimized selection of the number of choices shown

• Reduction of facets complexity

• Optimal placement of the most important facets dynamically selected

• and much more are key user experience benefits that are worth money

Content results

• "Content is King" - relevant blog posts lead to increased visit frequency, conversion, and shopping carts

• Boxalino enables seamless integration and "meshing" of content and products

Product listings

• Instead of simple, often best-seller-driven sorting: automatically intelligent sorting based on various criteria of user behavior, your business goals, the campaigns, etc.

• Calculation of specific metrics to optimize the user experience and results ("Rising Stars", "Imposters" & "Orphans").

• Increase of individually perceived relevance and therefore sales (Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Share of Wallet)

• Configurable, intelligent facets

Dynamic texts

• Design texts dynamically with placeholders that are filled by the context.

• This can be used to improve the user experience, as well as for SEO

How should the widgets appear visually?

The SEARCH / NAVI widgets typically are displayed in two separate parts:

1. The Search Results Page

2. The Search Autocomplete (preview while typing)

with (for the autocomplete) textual and product suggestions, and for the search results page, facets on the left (or above the search results) and a grid of products, as documented as “product grid”, “facets” and “autocomplete” in the Check-list: empower your Website Layout with Narratives | Layout Blocks (Templates) Check list.

Key focus: Search Term Relevance

The Search Term is important because identifying results that are relevant for the visitor is critical before improving them further with advanced technics such as search personalization. Your top-sellers should also have an important effect on the ranking of the search results, but showing best-sellers with medium to low relevance with the search term does not improve the search experience compared to showing products with lower sales statistics but with very high relevance to the search terms. Therefore, we recommend putting more focus (at least at first) on the Search Term Relevance (STR).

Related WPOs

The SEARCH / NAVI WPO belongs to the CONSIDERATION customer journey step (second column of the diagram above) and corresponds to LEVEL 1 as it is solely about products and not other types of content: combine it with PROMOTE, READ to also support recommendations of other types of content like banners or blog articles and use it within a smart, personalized and dynamic layout with TELL.

What widgets should you consider?

Typically, you should consider 2 widgets: search (for the search result page and the autocomplete) and navigation (for the product listing pages).

Self-Learning & Manual Semantic Filters

Before going to the next section which described the Optimization Strategies you can put in place to optimize the general ranking logic of the search results, it is important to consider Boxalino Semantic Filters which will play a key role in the filtering and ranking of each search query in particular.

First, Boxalino automatically learns what Semantic Filter should be applied by observing the behaviors of your customers when they search. This is by far the most powerful part as it will happen automatically and continuously.

But as self-learning require a certain level of statistics per search query to emerge and as not every possible case can be learned automatically, it is important that important search queries can be optimized manually (especially the top 10 to 100 most frequent searches).

WPO Optimization Strategies

Here is a selection from our Best Practice Strategies in 3 sections (what to configure before your go-live, what could be your first A/B test about and more advanced practices for later stages).

1. What to start with (for the go-live)?

2. What could be a/b tested first?

3. What else could be experimented with?

Expand the list to see all the additional Best Practices of this WPO.

Additional ideas for Widget Strategies

• Split your facets to put the standard facets on the left (categories, brands, price, etc.) and value-oriented facets on the top (clickable icons (checkboxes) with “top-sellers”, “novelties”, “discounts”)

• Show textual messages on top of the search results (as in the examples above in the section Dynamic Texts)

• Optimize the appearance of the facets so that they appear in the right order, that facets that are not relevant in the context are hidden, and that some of the first facets appear already expanded (showing the first few values before a “show more” link). All these can be configured in the Facet section of Boxalino Admin.

Onboarding project plan

Here are our suggestions for the project management steps of the SEARCH / NAVI widgets.

Integration notes

• Pre-requisites: Data exports (products, transactions, and optionally customer data) and Boxalino Tracker integration.

• Boxalino Narrative should be configured in Boxalino’s admin on the first appearing widget on the page (which should be the one called in the API request). The Narrative should define the layout of all the widgets (name of the widget to be indicated in the accessor parameter possibly with a hitCount to define how many products should be returned, for example: “topsellers[hitCount=15]”) as well as the labels.

• Boxalino Narrative API will return a list of blocks (for each block of product recommendations) each with a list of sub-blocks (with the list of products) as documented here, (make sure to make only one call to our API to retrieve all widgets and not a call per widget which would cause poorer speed performance on your frontend)

• Configure Facets in the Boxalino Admin so that you don’t have to configure in your code which facet should be used or not.

• Consider using the advanced options of facets to retrieve not only the facet value but also a value you can show to the user (label) and a value you can use in the URL when the facet is selected (to have SEO-friendly URLs).

• The products returned will always include the product ids (which might be all you need) and other product fields can be returned as well if requested in the API calls (see Return Fields)

• The request and the response should not be cached (consider an AJAX call in case you need to cache some parts of your page for performance reasons).

• Make sure to use an AJAX call directly to the Boxalino Cloud for the search autocomplete (this will be much faster than going through your servers)

• Make sure to tag your HTML with the required classes and entities returned by Boxalino as bx-attributes so the Boxalino tracker can identify automatically the scrolling behavior (including the appearance of the products when using the slider arrows).

• Before going live, make sure to control the Tracker Checklist