Search Best Practice Guide - How do you Identify Issues with Search?

When is your strategy not working, and how do you identify issues with search?

When managing search, it is easy to identify key performance metrics and report back to the business, but it can be more challenging to identify where search isn’t providing the expected response, find actionable insights and know when to make a change.

The first thing to consider is what information you're using to make your decisions.  Those responsible for search performance always focus on the most popular searches to make sure they’re optimised, but what about the long tail?  How do you deduce where you can improve the performance of those top terms?

Quantitative feedback:

• Searches with low click-through or add to bag rate.
• Search terms that deliver a zero results response.
• Searches with a high refinement rate (where customers input a secondary search from that result set).
• YoY comparison – normally trade moments are in-line YoY, so is there a significant difference in search performance YoY?.
• Comparing search performance to site.

Qualitative feedback:

• Input from colleagues.
• Knowledge of upcoming trends and promotions.
• Shopper feedback.

Classify the problem – keep this feedback in context.  Often qualitative feedback is reactionary, but it’s worth checking if the identified issue is part of a wider problem or isolated for a term with relatively low searches. In the latter cases, it’s ultimately not worth changing the overall search configuration to cater to a single term.

Most search issues can be identified as one of three problems:

• Why are products missing from my search result?
• Why are incorrect products being returned?
• Why are products being returned in this order?

Tips and tricks to make troubleshooting easier:

• Are the relevant display fields available? If not, these can be rearranged/activated in System > Display Fields
• If looking at the detail page, all available fields can be selected by switching ‘Preview Fields’ (see picture one, below)
• Do you have read access to the search index and attribute localisation? These are useful areas to troubleshoot search, even if you can’t physically make changes
• Pay attention to the search pass that is matching – often partial matches can give the misleading impression that search isn’t working, but this isn’t the case.

See below troubleshooting workflows to help identify the source of your search issue. For more information, please get in touch with ExperienceConsulting@attraqt.com.