The web was buzzing last week with news of the Facebook IPO. Much of the news seemed to focus around Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth and the new crop of millionaires that will be made out of Facebook employees.  Silicon Valley exotic car dealers and real estate agents have probably been lined up outside Facebook HQ handing out business cards. With Facebook’s estimated valuation now a staggering $75 to $100 billion you may be wondering how on earth a company with revenues of $3.7 billion could be with that much.  I certainly am.

When you look at the stats surrounding Facebook, you realize that their potential to grow revenue is equally as staggering.  For instance, Facebook now has 845 million active users which represents a 45 percent increase since 2010.  More than half of their users return to the site each day.  And these users have produced an average of 2.7 billion “likes” and comments each day in the last three months of 2011. Now, when you consider the wealth of information Facebook has about it’s users and how they enable advertisers to target based on this, you begin to see the potential for a much greater share of advertising dollars. I think it’s only a matter of time before brand advertisers and businesses discover this and start fighting over the ad inventory as they now do on Google.

But what about retailers?  How can they cash in on Facebook’s success?  To start with, retailers need to have a presence on Facebook by building a page. I know this is obvious and hard to imagine that any retailer has not yet claimed their brand on Facebook but I still come across retailers who have not.  Having a page on Facebook enables their massive audience to “Like” your brand and start sharing what they think of you with their friends.

The ability to post comments about your store on Facebook has become a powerful tool for retailers to generate content from their customers. For example, asking a question on your Facebook wall to find out what your fans like most about a particular product is a great way to generate positive feedback and endorsement for that product.  Then, what makes this even more powerful is when you have your site search technology crawl these Facebook posts and make them available in your site search results. Retailers can now instantly reach out to their most engaged brand advocates and ask them all sorts of questions.  Questions like how they are using products, what advice they have for others for selecting the best product for a particular solution, what tips they have for using your products, and on and on.  All of this fantastic content can them be made available to new visitors through site search.

To encourage more sharing, retailers have begun placing Facebook like buttons on the product pages. This practice has exploded in the past year to the point where it feels hard to find retailers who don’t include a Like button.  Generating likes for your products shows an even deeper engagement from your customers and is a much more powerful way to drive sales.  The challenge is to actually get your customers to click the like button.  It seems consumer adoption of this has been relatively low.

One thing retailers like FTD.com have done to grow their product like activity is incorporate the Like button directly into their site search results.  This gives it much more visibility and from a usability perspective is much easier for people to click like as they browse products in search results.  There’s even a added usability benefit as retailers have incorporated the ability to sort search results by the number of likes.  I expect that the desire to sort by likes might actually become more popular than sorting by product star ratings. And, this added functionality will encourage that many more consumers to cast their vote for a product by clicking the like button.

FTD.com Search Includes Facebook Likes

The final tip I would have for cashing in on Facebook’s popularity is to enable those who visit your page on Facebook to initiate a search of your product catalog easily right from within your page.  This can be done by adding a tab on your page that includes a search box and incorporating the search functionality into your other custom tabs such as your Facebook default page.  Here’s an example from Chaparral Motorsports.

Chaparral Motorsports Enables Search on Facebook

Retailers are collecting an amazing amount of priceless content from their customers comments on social networking sites like Facebook.  Unfortunately, much of this great content only reaches a limited audience because of how social media works.  For the most part, people only see what others are talking about right now.  It is a fast flowing stream that is nearly impossible to keep up with.  Without some way to pause the flow of content and capture it for later use, the value that this content can provide your business is dramatically reduced.

Although this situation sounds bleak, SLI Systems is providing a solution for many retailers that extends the life of their Facebook and social media content by allowing it to be discovered through their site’s search results.  I think the best way to illustrate the benefits of this is to provide some use case examples.

Let’s start with an example from 24 Hour Fitness.  If you are looking for a fun way to shed a few extra holiday pounds you might be searching for “exercise class ideas.”  As a 24 Hour Fitness member, or someone who just happens to come across their site, if you searched for that phrase you would find a wide assortment of results including pages, videos, products, social networks, and their blog and forum.  With a social networks tab showing 78 results that would be a good place to start for find unbiased advice.

The top result is from a Facebook post that asks, “What Group Exercise class best compliments your personal training routine and why?” Clicking this takes you a 24 Hour Fitness Facebook page showing the 50 most recent comments out of a total of 169 that they received.  The comments provide an incredible list of recommendations and endorsements from existing customers about all types of exercise classes such as Body Pump, Turbo Kick, Yoga and Zumba.  What’s great about this is that all of this content was created after 24 Hour Fitness posted the question back on November 18th of 2011 and now it’s all easily accessible everyday to customers searching their site for this information.

In another example, let’s say you just saw a TV commercial for the new Smart Touch gloves from Totes Isotoner and you want to find out what their people are saying about these gloves.  A good place to start would be the Totes Isotoner site with a search for “Smart Touch Gloves.”  This search would present you with a Social Media tab that had six results. 

Under the Social Media tab, you would learn about the gloves being featured on the Today Show and discover this great product endorsement posted as a comment on their Facebook wall back on January 10th.

Finally, if you are an aspiring fashion jewelry designer, one of your biggest challenges is coming up with a color scheme for your next jewelry design.  At Artbeads.com, if you searched for “color scheme” you would find five results under their community tab.

The top result from Facebook calls your attention to a free online tool called the Color Scheme Designer. Click the link and you’ll see a screen shot of the designer posted on January 2nd. You’ll also be able to read the many comments from other jewelry designers expressing their challenges about picking colors. Seeing this sort of content from people just like you will help you feel more a part of the community and give you a good reason to “Like” Artbeads.com on Facebook.

With the ability to include content from your Facebook wall and other social media sites in site search results, retailers can get much more mileage from their social media content. And, more importantly, they will be better able to harness the power of their customers for creating content. One way to do this is to look through your sites search phrases for questions customers are asking. Then, turn these questions into Facebook posts and let your community provide the answers. This strategy would be especially useful if your site was lacking content in these areas.

What other ideas do you have for Facebook posts that would engage your customers and inspire them to create quality content for your store? Post your ideas in the comments below.

Ed Hoffman just pointed out an interesting search box on the LA times site. When you click on the search box it pops up to a larger box and includes a link to their advanced search.
Before you click

After you click

As part of our site search tips – we recommend making the search box large enough to handle most of your queries. If you’re just not able to afford the real estate then this is a nice compromise. Note: There are other benefits to having a large search box – the most important being a large search box is easier to find. You want it to be easier to find to encourage people to search because typically people who search will convert 2-3 times better than people who don’t.

I think search is less important on a news site than, say an ecommerce site. I think the LA times approach of having a small search box that gets larger when you click on it is sensible. Nice work LA times!

SLI Systems Blog, Guest Post

Contributed by: Ed Kennedy, Business Development, Guidance

Recently, I was listening to APM’s Marketplace Tech Report which highlighted how Google and Bing are now including social content such as Twitter and Facebook postings in natural search results.  The report left me wondering how retailers can leverage social search to drive traffic to their sites.

So … I decided to contact eCommerce search partner, SLI Systems, to learn more about how this new trend has impacted their site search and navigation solution.  During our conversation, we talked about ways retailers can combine social and search to enhance the customer’s shopping experience.  Here are some of them:

• Index social media content in search results: If you have blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook wall posts, videos on YouTube or photos on Flickr, all of this content should appear in your site search results – possibly in a separate tab, as Yarn.com handles it.




• Place Facebook “like” buttons on product pages: This will encourage site visitors to share your products with their connections. In addition, Facebook “likes” can improve the page’s ranking on search engines, like Bing. You can also import the number of likes that each product has into your site search index and allow your site visitors to reorder site search results so the products with the most “likes” are ranked highest.
• Add search to your Facebook page: You can add a search box to your company Facebook page, and results will appear within Facebook. This is a good way to build stronger relationships with shoppers who like to combine shopping with social networking. Here is Chaparral Motorsports’ facebook search.




• Implement Facebook Sign-In for your store: A more advanced integration between Facebook and your commerce site is allowing visitors to use their Facebook profile as their account on your store. This reduces the amount of information visitors need to provide to create an account with your site. This functionality can also trigger personalized content for the user based on their friend’s activity on the site. TripAdvisor does a good job of encouraging Facebook Sign-In and using friends’ activity to promote certain destinations or trips.




• Encourage user generated content and tie to social networks: When Guidance designed TOMS Shoes, our User Experience and Design team looked for ways to combine the customer’s passion for the brand’s canvas shoe and the popularity of social networks. They came up with How We Wear Them, a section on TOMS’ site that allows users to upload a photo of themselves wearing their favorite pair of TOMS. The user associates the shoe in the photo to a SKU in the catalog, linking directly to that product detail page (PDP) and is then prompted to share the photo on Facebook. These images are then represented as thumbnails on the PDP, adding a social touch to the buying experience.

Got any tips of your own?  Share them with me via Twitter, @EdwardPKennedy, or via @guidance.

We just posted our latest video tip by Shaun Ryan today, the 2nd of a two-part series on site search refinements. This latest tip (just 6 ½ minutes long) covers many aspects of how best to display refinements on your site, looking at options such as category boxes down the left with items underneath (either links or check boxes), drop-down boxes (which allow for more refinements above the fold), refinement tabs across the top of the search results page, and other variations, like using icons instead of text.

The video also discusses how best to allow your visitors to refine results and then go back to the full list if they wish, and options for offering price range refinements. Additionally, the video looks at the benefits of introducing new refinements after a top-level refinement is selected. As Shaun emphasizes throughout, there are many best practices approaches to follow, but the best way to determine what works on your site is to test, test and test (we can help you with this effort).

In the first part of this two-part series (a 4 ½-minute segment), Shaun discusses what refinements are, why you should have them on your site and how best to select the refinements that will work best for your products and customers – for example, by color (using color swatches), top-sellers, men’s/women’s, star ratings, etc. One way to tell what refinements might work is to look at your search logs to see what terms people are using on your site (e.g. “red shirt” may indicate that a color refinement will work well). Aside from the obvious benefit of streamlining the search experience for your customers, refinements give you a deeper glimpse into what your customers are looking for and how they’re searching – which is always useful information for your business.

MagnetStreet, an online retailer of personalized save-the-date items and wedding invitations, has four distinct lines of business: one for real estate agents and general businesses, one for schools, one for brides-to-be and one for general consumers. As such, the company has distinct product lines for each business segment, which previously posed significant challenges in how MagnetStreet handled the different lines in its site search. Ultimately, MagnetStreet turned to us for help.

The solution we created, which has worked well for MagnetStreet and its customers, is to deliver search results with separate tabs for each distinct market, so brides-to-be aren’t seeing items geared towards real estate agents or school teachers in their results. If you go to www.magnetstreet.com and do a search for “save the date” you’ll see what I mean. Across the top of results are tabs for “All,” “Weddings,” “Business,” “Life Moments” and “Schools” – making it very easy to view the type of products you’re uniquely interested in. Results can also be refined by style, color, theme, product type and more – to streamline the search experience even further.

The results are telling. MagnetStreet’s analytics show that people who use the search box on the site convert at nearly double the rate of those who don’t, and twice as many site visitors now use search than they did previously. Additionally, visitors using site search view more than twice the number of pages per visit than visitors who don’t, and also spend slightly more per visit than shoppers who don’t search.

So, back to the original question – should separate lines of business have their own site search? The answer is: not necessarily – You can create one site search for the whole company, and offer separate tabs for each line of business. That will give you brand consistency across your different business lines, and also only one technology to maintain. As one of my friends once told me: “Sure, I could buy a boat with two engines instead of one, an go faster, but that will give me two things to maintain, instead of one.” So, words to the wise: keep it simple, and keep it consistent. For MagnetStreet, that approach has worked well.

In my last post, I offered some tips for improving the visitor experience at online retailing sites. To continue the discussion, below are some simple website enhancements that can help your customers find information they need more easily, and will likely lead to more valuable interactions.

• Prominently display the customer service phone number on the home page (and every page of the site) – and make other company contact information easy to find. You don’t want people to have to hunt down the info. Check out the home page for Allé Jewelry, which displays the company phone number right under the logo at the top of every page.
• Place the e-mail subscription box high up on the web page so it’s more readily seen – more subscribers can equal more sales. Agri Supply places its email signup box near the upper left corner of the page, which makes it hard to miss.
• Give visitors a good incentive to sign up for e-mails, such as: “Want to receive additional discounts, offers and hear more about our events? Sign up here.” Buggies Unlimited touts exclusive deals for people who subscribe to its e-mails.
• Test different placements for your search box. Most retailers place it somewhere in the upper right-hand section of the page. However, some of our customers – such as WEBS and LydiasUniforms.com – place the search box on the center of the page, and even experiment with different search box sizes. It’s worth testing placements and sizes to see what works best for your customers.
• Include a “Your Account” button in an easy-to-spot location on the home page, so return visitors can quickly check the status of recent orders, their purchasing history, etc.
• Include a “Locally in Retail Stores” link so people can easily find out what items are available in stores nearby, in case they prefer to purchase offline.

These are just a few things you can do to make your website perform better. If you have other ideas to share, feel free to post a comment below.

As head of SLI’s customer success management team, I’ve had lots of interactions with online retailers and have seen many instances of companies not doing all they can to turn online visits into sales. Simple things like not utilizing empty space on a web page or offering easily viewed company contact information can amount to lost opportunities – or basically, leaving money on the table.

Based on my own experience (and that of my colleagues), working closely with retailers to improve the usability of their sites, as well as industry research I’ve come across, I’ve put together some fairly simple tips for online merchants – no matter how big or how small the company – to improve the visitor experience and generate a higher ROI (Return on Interaction) online. Below is the first set of tips. In my next blog post, I’ll offer more suggestions for enhancing your site to give customers better access to information and drive stronger interactions.

Feature a new “Item of the Week”: This can catch customers’ interest and is also indexed by search engines as refreshed content each week, so it helps generate more visibility. You can feature it right on the home page – as a banner or in a special content box, or in another way that fits the look and feel of your site. BikeSomeWhere.com does this by showing “this week’s newest products” in a prominent box on the home page.

Make the most of empty space: Use empty white space on the right side of the webpage for a list of “bestselling items” – again, because this content refreshes on a frequent basis, it’s indexed by search engines. Also, research shows that most sites don’t utilize the right side of the page, so it’s valuable real estate that’s likely available, and can help clean up content that may be cluttering the left side of your site pages. On its site’s right-hand margin, Beauty Bridge lists “best sellers” to highlight product options for shoppers.

Show rotating “featured items” on front page: This is a good way to showcase different items you offer, perhaps popular sellers or items you want to promote more. You can do this in a rotating banner – perhaps midway down the page – where every few seconds a new item shows up. The feature can help keep customers engaged, reduce clutter on the home page, and increase site usability. Hansen’s Surf Shop does this on its home page with a rotating banner, allowing visitors to see a constantly changing selection of clothing, accessories, and even special offers like free shipping.

In my next blog post, I’ll tell you how to make your online retailing site more user-friendly.

One of our goals for 2011 is to significantly beef up our arsenal of useful, educational content. Along those lines, we’ve just made available a new Ecommerce Podcast interview with Tim Parry, senior writer for Multichannel Merchant. Tim talked with our CEO Shaun Ryan about how multichannel retailers are using e-commerce marketing tools to boost sales. For example, Tim explained that printed catalogs are still very much in favor and are great for driving customers to a website, and that shoppers with smartphones typically use them in physical stores to research products and compare prices, and possibly make a purchase. Tim shared lots of interesting thoughts on ecommerce trends in the year ahead, and the podcast is definitely worth a listen.

We’ve also released a new video tutorial in which Shaun offers tips for the best ways to create site search for mobile devices. Watch the video here, and you’ll see how site search results should look on a mobile screen, what information to highlight (like prices) and how to display things like refinements and customer ratings.

In the coming weeks we’ll also offer video tutorials on things like refinements, Rich Auto Complete, and social media in site search. Stay tuned.

Last week, Brian Burstein of MarketingSherpa shared some useful tips on the SherpaBlog for maximizing your site search (a few were provided by our CEO, Shaun Ryan) in his post “On-site Search: How to help your customers find what they want (to buy).” Interestingly, as Brian reports, “According to the MarketingSherpa Ecommerce Benchmark Report, customers who use the search box on ecommerce sites convert at nearly three times the rate of general browsers. Yet, 52% of marketers graded their internal search a ‘D’ or ‘F.’”

It’s staggering that so many marketers give their site search such a poor grade. Whatever the reason, Brian’s post includes a variety of solid tips that are fairly easy to implement. I recommend you check it out, and commend Brian for providing this advice to online marketers as site search is a critical yet often overlooked feature of any website. What grade do you give your own site search? If it’s anything lower than a B+ (or even if you give it an A), it’s probably time to give this feature some attention.