Last week it was announced that Google’s search suggestion feature is being updated. The major changes are:

1. You will see results and ads in the suggestions, along with the keyword suggestions (it looks like only one result and ad at any time)
2. The suggestion feature will be rolled out to the standard search results page - at the moment it is only on Google’s home page & toolbar. (I guessed they would do this in my post about Google Suggest last August)
3. The suggestions shown will incorporate your search history

I haven’t seen the new features live yet - but I wonder what impact this will have on the referrals you see in your web logs. If someone searches from Google’s homepage - and clicks on a result from the Google suggest list - then the referrer will presumably be google.com. This will mean that the referral URL won’t contain the search term. I recently saw google.com in our own web logs but didn’t think anything of it at the time. I wonder if was a referral from Google Suggest?

If someone searches from an existing search page then the referrer will be that page and won’t contain search term they were actually using. That means the referral URL will contain a different keyword - possibly completely irrelevant. For example if I search for Microsoft then type in Apple and choose the Apple.com homepage from Google Suggest then the referral URL in Apple’s web logs would be something like: http://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft and analytics software may mistakenly assume that they were ranking for the term microsoft.

There may be similar problems with the reporting for paid search. Presumably the folks at Google have thought of this and have some sort of solution.

Has anyone seen evidence of this happening?  Is there anything Google could do to help us accurately see the search term that was actually used (for example sending people through a redirect that contained the keyword in the URL)?

We will be at the SMX Sydney conference in Australia this week.  To find our more about the event check out http://www.searchmarketingexpo.com.au/.

Yesterday we released a podcast interview with our customer Ian MacDonald from Century Novelty. During this interview Ian talks about how he started off as a stock boy while he was at school and is now General Manager.

Century Novelty started with a physical store in 1951 but is now is exclusively online. Focusing solely on their online store has given them some valuable experience. I’m sure you’ll enjoy listening to Ian share some of the secrets he has discovered from this experience.

Also see our press release which summarises the ROI Century Novelty achieved from using SLI’s Learning Search and Site Champion services.

Today we announced that Jelly Belly are using SLI’s Learning search and Site Champion. We’ve also released an interview with Jason Marrone, Jelly Belly’s e-commerce marketing manager. The interview was fun and informative. It made me hungry talking about all their candy. It was really interesting to hear about one of their most successful promotions that used reverse psychology - they asked their customers not to tell anyone about a special deal they had and before they knew it their servers were overloaded. I know reverse psychology works with my kids - it made me smile to see it working in a viral marketing campaign.

Last week we announced that Lighting by Gregory, one of the largest lighting and ceiling fan distributors in the U.S., has seen some impressive results from using our Learning Search site search and Site Champion user-generated SEO solutions. In fact, they’ve seen a 40% increase in their online conversion rate since deploying our technology.

With more than 150,000 products in their e-commerce inventory, the lighting retailer needed a robust, intelligent search solution that would give visitors an easy way to find what they’re looking for and not deliver items with little or no relevance in the search results. The company also needed something that returned results lightning quick and that could help customers further refine their searches. Their previous site search from Google just didn’t cut it. (Don’t get us wrong, we like Google and think their Internet search engine is a powerful tool (as does practically everyone else!), but site search is not their sweet spot. It IS ours, as Lighting by Gregory’s results show.)

Lighting by Gregory initially underwent a 30-day free trial, a standard offer for any new customer, and saw how quickly SLI went to work for them. They signed up immediately after the trial ended and have continued to see positive results.

As Lighting by Gregory learned, site search users usually bring in more revenue on average per visitor than those who opt to simply navigate the site. If your site search isn’t delivering the results it should, we’d love to go to work for you too.

I spotted this post touting the benefits of mining your site search. It’s a point I’ve made before but it’s valuable and worth repeating - your site search logs are a fantastic source for keyword research. It’s worth looking at these to get keyword lists for PPC & SEO. And you should be looking at them to make sure that you have good results on your internal search for the terms people are actually using.

Marketing Sherpa released a Search Marketing report today. It contains some interesting information about search marketing but - also, a lot of information about internal search (aka site search).

Some points worth noting:

• Analyzing internal site search terms was one of the most popular keyword research techniques identified for search marketing.

• One survey greatly emphasised the importance of site search - over 50% of people who have decided what they are going to do when they visit a retailer site have decided to use the site search. We’ve seen this data before - about 50% of people are search focused - but it’s great to have it reinforced. This is why over 95% of retail sites now have search boxes.
• Even though it is universally recognized that site search is extremely important and that people who use site search are more likely to buy, over half the retailers rated their site search as being poor! What’s more retailers rated their site search higher than non-retailers - so the non retail sites have even worse site search.

This highlights the opportunity that site search vendors like SLI have - to help these sites improve their search.

The section on site search finishes with a summary of a case study and quotes our customer Shirely Tan, from American Bridal.

I recommend reading the report.