We have a growing number of customers implementing Rich Auto Complete. We have some preliminary data from them and the results are looking very interesting. First of all some background…

What  is Auto Complete

The precursor to Rich Auto Complete is Auto Complete. This shows search terms below the search box that match the characters you have typed into a search box. This is a common feature on web search engines, such as Google and is now a standard site search feature on many sites. We have been providing auto complete to our clients for a couple of years now. It’s a great feature because it helps searchers with their query formation, it reduces errors, and adds a little serendipity to the search experience.

What is Rich Auto Complete?

Rich Auto Complete is a search feature that shows search results as you type into the search box. This is normally implemented using AJAX, which captures the keystrokes as they are made and sends the partial search term to a server which provides search results which match the partial search term. The example below from Best Buy Eyeglasses is showing a mixture search suggestions and products.

Some sites, such as Apple have had Rich Auto Complete for a long time. We have begun offering it to our customers over the past few months and are getting a lot of interest in this feature. The initial data from the analytics are looking very promising.

So what difference does it make?

First of all some qualifiers – this data is very preliminary, taken from only a few sites (not from the sites mentioned above).

• A lot of people use this: 33% of people who search used the Rich Auto Complete (clicking on either a search suggestion, or a product)
• Those that use this feature convert at twice the rate of those that don’t
• The average order value for people who use this feature is 17% higher than for those who search and don’t use this feature.

We haven’t done an A/B test yet, so it could be that the people who use this feature would convert at a higher rate, with a higher average order value anyway. However the indications are that this is going to be a popular feature that significantly improves the performance of your website.

Why does it work?

Rich Auto Complete shortens the path from searching to buying. By allowing people to click on products directly from the search box it skips the need to see the search page.

The future

I’m sure that you will see Rich Auto Complete appearing on many sites over the coming months and years. It will start to become a standard feature. Linda Bustos from the Get Elastic blog predicted this last year. I’m only a year behind – but I support that prediction.

PS: Interestingly this hasn’t become a standard feature on the web search engines. Maybe this is because it significantly increases the bandwidth and query volumes they would need to support on their servers. I do remember seeing reports that Google was testing something like this a while back. This week there was another report about a Google test where they would update the whole search results page as you typed.

Earlier this week we announced our new Learning Search for Publishers, a new variation of our hosted site search product aimed at the online publishing/digital media industry. The value proposition of a good site search in online publishing is similar to that of e-commerce: it improves the visitor experience, increases page views and can result in more sales. For publishers, our offering takes it a step further by providing useful data about search terms and resulting items clicked on to advertisers, giving them an opportunity to deliver more targeted ads to visitors.

Take our customer Dilbert.com (which we also announced yesterday). Dilbert.com recently added our site search to the popular cartoon strip site, making it much easier for fans to search the 20-year archive by character name or theme/topic (warning: if you engage in this activity you may find yourself wasting a LOT of time).

Dilbert’s previous site search didn’t allow for this, so people either had to know the exact date of the cartoon strip or search by character and hope they found it. Since the Dilbert.com site is supported by display ads, as well as licensing revenues (people license the comic strip for use in books, t-shirts, company newsletters and other things), a good site search is important to its business. Since deploying our site search, page views are already up 3 percent (a substantial number given that the site sees more than 1 million visitors a month), and the company says they also expect licensing sales to also increase.

Another benefit of an effective site search on a digital media site is the ability to drive visitors to the variety of content available – for example, videos and blog posts, and revenue-generating content, such as subscriber-only articles (some of our customers have also seen revenue increases from more people clicking on articles behind the pay-wall). Without the ability to refine and help narrow down searches to find the desired content, visitors are not likely to remain on the site or make return visits. And higher page views mean that online publishers can set higher advertising rates.

We’re excited about entering this new market and see lots of opportunity among media sites in need of better, more impactful site search. We’ll be talking more about the challenges publishers face and how site search can address them in the coming months, as well as some of the unique benefits our customers have gotten from using Learning Search.

On Wed., July 28 we’re hosting a free webinar featuring Forrester Research Principal Analyst Brian Walker. The webinar, “Unlock Powerful Customer Information to Generate Higher Conversions with Site Search,” will cover a variety of topics, among them –  how site search data can reveal valuable information about customers and their research and purchasing intentions, and what you can do with this data to improve other marketing efforts and ultimately, your business. Brian is a reputable expert on e-commerce technologies and the user experience, and he has great insights to share about how retailers can make more effective use of site search to deliver the type of content and information people require to make a purchase.

In the webinar, Brian will discuss things like how you can discover from site search information whether customers are finding products in stock (or not) or if they’re looking for products not available on your site that you might want to add, and what products are trending in popularity. Site search data can also reveal long-tail keywords that are useful for SEO and paid search campaigns, and can help you determine how best to guide shoppers to items they seek through behavioral features like Related Search suggestions and Auto Complete.

The webinar will also discuss how you can incorporate site search data into other marketing activities, like personalized emails; on-site merchandising, banner advertisements and promotions; and content development, and the role site search plays on the mobile platform.

We hope to make the webinar interactive, so if you plan to attend please come prepared with questions and comments. You can sign up to attend this webinar at http://www.sli-systems.com/brian-walker-forrester-site-search-webinar.php.

This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition was a great success – thanks to the team at Internet Retailer who worked so hard to pull off an amazing event!

Probably to nobody’s surprise, mobile commerce was a big theme this year. As our recent survey revealed, 80% of retailers haven’t yet tackled the mobile arena, but my guess is that’s going to change quickly in the months to come. Given the early results from some of our customers, it seems clear that having a mobile web site is not just about keeping up with trends, it’s good for business.

SLI had quite a presence at IRCE, with 14 members of our team on the show floor, and we also sponsored drinks on two nights (hopefully you enjoyed a cocktail or two on us). Three of our customers presented, and we saw lots of traffic to our booth. We also had a drawing for a 3-D TV and 3-D DVD Blu-ray player – the winner was Lada Heep, eChannel manager for Thomson Reuters. Congratulations, Lada!

If you were at IRCE 2010, hopefully we had a chance to connect – but if not, feel free to drop us a note if you have any questions or requests. Next stops are eTail East (Aug. 9-12, Baltimore), Search Engine Strategies San Francisco (August 16-20) and Shop.org Annual Summit (Sept. 27-29, Dallas). We hope to see you there!

Earlier this month we moved our North American headquarters into a new space in downtown San Jose. Our new location at 333 W. San Carlos Ave. is bigger, giving us plenty of room to grow. And if the past year is any indication, continued growth seems certain.  (The views aren’t too bad either.)

 As we continue to innovate new site search features and techniques and pursue new markets, demand for our solutions has grown. And so have our sales, marketing, development and customer support teams.

We’re also now fairly central to many of our customers and technology partners located around the Bay Area. Of course, we serve retailers and other Internet sites around the globe – and our UK and New Zealand offices have grown as well.

If you’re in the area, stop by and see us in our new location. And if you’re game, our team will gladly introduce you to the tempting grasshopper appetizers at the nearby Mezcal.

No matter if you’re selling products, services or information online, to be successful, site visitors must be able to quickly and easily find what they came for – or they will leave, often never to return.

Our customer Ciena, a leader in network infrastructure is a good example. The company relies on its website for lead generation, and thus offers a great deal of educational materials on its site – i.e. whitepapers, product data sheets, videos and webinars – all designed to capture the interest of potential clients.

Ciena’s previous site search solution wasn’t resulting in the leads the company needed. They didn’t have visibility into how their visitors were moving through the site after conducting a search and weren’t confident visitors were finding useful information to download. Adding to the problem was the inability for their previous site search solution to integrate with any type of web analytics solution, like Omniture. And the Ciena web marketing team had to spend a great deal of time on special coding whenever there were any changes in the product pages to make sure the site search picked them up.

Ciena turned to us.

SLI worked with Ciena to implement both our Learning Search and Site Champion solutions to improve relevance of search results, as well as create pages optimized for search engines. Our services also easy integrate with analytics platforms like Omniture (and Google Analytics) to provide greater insight into visitor’s web behavior.

Ciena immediately saw results and a marked improvement in online visitor engagement. According to data from their Omniture analytics, in the second half of 2009, 18.5 percent of online visitors who used site search went on to download one or more files, compared to just 4 percent of visitors who entered the site via the home page, and who did not use site search.

In addition, Ciena’s site search results pages have become the number one entryway to the Ciena site. The company has tied 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations directly to these pages. And those registrations go straight into their sales lead funnel. You can read more about their deployment in the recent issue of Target Marketing magazine or via the case study on our site.

On the Internet, great customer service goes a long way toward increasing sales. A useable, easily searchable site is a key component. We are hard at work with our customers daily helping them ensure their site visitors become paying customers and not their competitor’s customers. Please contacts us if you would like to find out more.

We recently conducted a survey of more than 400 e-commerce companies about their plans and activities in mobile commerce (m-commerce). The feedback was intriguing, to say the least. We found that while recent reports are pointing to significant growth in mobile subscriber numbers and an uptick in m-commerce, the majority of online retailers (80%) do not currently have a mobile commerce strategy in place. Yet, 83% of survey takers say between 1-10% of visitors come to their sites from mobile browsers and 12% cite that 11-20% get to their sites through the mobile web. As those numbers are expected to grow rapidly, we believe this represents a significant opportunity, and those of you that are preparing now for the influx of new business the mobile web represents stand to benefit.

The good news is, while many online retailers may be slow to adopt m-commerce, most recognize the opportunity and plan to address it in the near future. Fifty-six percent (56%) believe a mobile commerce strategy is very important or important to their overall business and 38% say it is important for driving sales. The majority (70%) plan to embark on an m-commerce strategy within the next two years. Only 38% believe m-commerce will be important or somewhat important to this year’s holiday campaigns, while 62% say it will not be important. It will be interesting to see the outcome this holiday season.

According to a recent post from Tim Parry of Chief Marketer, those that have yet to embark on a full-fledged m-commerce strategy may consider launching a mobile site now for research instead of focusing all of their efforts on sales. The thinking behind this is that it might help retailers determine the mobile usage patterns of their customers, so specific needs can be met as m-commerce strategies are expanded.

Other SLI m-commerce survey highlights include:

• Seventy-nine percent (79%) say site search is important to a mobile website strategy and 61% are confident site search capabilities on a mobile site will generate additional conversions.
• The top four features online retailers cite as the most important to enhancing the m-commerce experience are navigation (73%), site search (59%), product pages (54%) and product reviews (40%).
• Of companies looking to build their m-commerce sites, 31% will utilize in-house resources, 28% will outsource the work to a third party developer, 36% will use a combination of both in-house and outsourced resources and the remainder are unsure.
• Fifty-one percent (51%) of e-commerce companies do not consider the iPad to be a mobile device (they say iPad users can utilize their current website); yet 31% will direct iPad to their mobile site.
• Only 22% of e-commerce organizations have developed shopping apps for platforms including iPhone, Android, iPad and BlackBerry, while 49% are planning on creating apps, but don’t currently have one; and 29% are not planning on creating apps at all.

Thanks to all who participated in our survey. The full results will be made available on our site in the next few weeks. It will be interesting over the coming months to see how retailers respond to the growing m-commerce demand. We are already working with a number of you on adopting a successful m-commerce strategy, and look forward to helping others increase sales through the mobile web in the near future.

We’ve all been busy this week getting ready for IRCE which starts tomorrow in Chicago – and it looks like this year’s event is going to be one of the best yet. Several of our customers and ecommerce technology partners will be there, and we’re looking forward to all that’s in store.  If you’re a retailer, be sure to stop by our booth #301 — we’ll be providing complimentary Site Search Evaluations where our team will look at your site and offer suggestions for how you can improve the site search to create a better user experience (and capture more conversions!).

We’re also holding a drawing for a Samsung 3D TV and 3D Blu-Ray Player – so be sure to drop by our booth and enter to win.

If you haven’t already registered for IRCE, we’re offering a $100 discount on registration fees. To receive the discount simply click here and enter discount code EC02220 and Booth #301.

We hope to see you there.

We want to give a shout-out to our customer CenturyNovelty on picking up another Multichannel Merchant magazine award – marking its second year of winning in a row!

The MCM Awards are the top honors for B2B and B2C marketers; they recognize superior print catalogs and websites from around the globe. Gold and silver awards are given for quality in both print and Web, and the Cross Channel Award honors multichannel merchants for synergy across print and Web channels. The winners were selected from 51 print channel finalists and 21 Web channel finalists.

Some of the top brands in the country, like LL Bean (Catalog of the Year & Cross-channel Merchant of the Year), Orvis and Crutchfield were all winners. You can see the complete list here http://multichannelmerchant.com/news/ll-bean-musicians-friend-2010-mcm-awards/?cid=nl_mcm_weekly.

Congratulations to the CenturyNovelty team for their hard work and an award well-deserved!