– CASE STUDY –

Overhauling site search & enriching analytics to increase sales from search by 40%.

– THE FEEDBACK –

“I have worked closely with Luke to understand and increase our customer engagement and conversion at Paperchase. He has been a key player in integrating and setting up our new search engine.

Luke’s energy is infectious, his work ethic and knowledge of ecommerce conversion, search and strategy is second to none.

The way he educates and informs the wider business stakeholders on the importance of customer engagement and the importance of data is super helpful in gaining buy-in from the top and spreading the message on how to improve conversion and the customer experience”

Alix Craig, Head of Product, Paperchase

The brief:

Paperchase was suffering from a self-confessed conversion issue on their website; they knew they were converting at a sup-bar level but they weren’t clear as to the root causes and why.

I was provided with virtually full autonomy and I was asked to work with their product and marketing teams to identify why and mentor relevant teams and stakeholders along the way for longer term management post my exit from the digital team.

After some initial data mining (from within Google Analytics, site search data and running custom crawls) it was clear that there were some substantial blind spots and significant tech stack gaps that needed to be addressed.

Key challenges:

  • Getting stakeholders onboard, securing budgets, leadership buy-in and challenging the ‘this is how it’s always been done’ mindset.
  • Securing the best pricing and negotiating favourable agreements with new technology partners and vendors to replace legacy and outdated systems
  • Training and onboarding in-house teams so they’re comfortable and confident with using and maximising the potential from the new systems

The results

  • A dramatic improvement in site search use and engagement (CTR from search results increased by around 1/3)
  • Sales from customers using search increased by 40%
  • A tangible and noticeable improvement in average order value where search was used in session
  • Dramatically improved search results (better handling of misspellings, synonyms, broad searches etc.)

How did I generate strong sales growth via search?

Closely analysing the top 10,000 search queries for insights and opportunity

Users that use site search are much more likely to convert than users that don’t (in this study it’s 5-6x greater); so it’s incredibly important to maximise performance for all queries.

Analysing the top 10k queries at scale allowed me to get a bird’s eye view of site search performance, understand where it’s working well and more importantly identify gaps where Paperchase was haemorrhaging revenue and sales.

Surprisingly there were some significant blind spots where sales were being lost – these were now visible and could therefore be addressed.

Proactive and detailed analytics

Analysing the top 10k keywords is a critical step to identifying issues; however search intent, demand and queries change overtime, which is especially the case for Paperchase.

For example, Valentine’s Day is going to capture very different queries to Mother’s Day.

So to ensure we were constantly monitoring performance and collecting insights; Google Analytics was customised and developed extensively to allow us to continually capture rich search data and insight.

This allowed us to gain visibility over the medium to long-term and see how search fixes would improve over time.

Building a case to invest in search technology

After the initial analysis It quickly became apparent that the previous site search technology wasn’t able to provide the experience that customers had come to expect; it was also a considerable cost considering it was legacy technology.

I put together a case with fresh data and insight at the centre; emphasising the challenges and pain-points that customers were experiencing on a daily basis with the current search technology.

On the flip side, I then showcased how investing in a specific new site search tech would not only rectify these frustrations but go on to deliver a powerful and entirely personalised search experience for customers.

Leveraging 1:1 personalisation of results

Paperchase positioned personalisation as a ‘nice to have’ or luxury feature, but it was soon explained that in such a vertical it’s very much a must have feature.

With so many products for sale accommodating for many tastes, preferences, colours, sizes etc it absolutely makes perfect sense to identify and cater to an individual’s preferences and tastes.

Personalised search is a first for Paperchase and it’s certainly contributes to the sales increases via search.

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