Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Going through the results, you will notice that the search utility participates in
£51,416.62 of the overall £120,529.88 revenue for the given period. this means that
43 percent of all revenue-generating visits touched site search. my rule of thumb is
that half your revenue is in some way, shape, or form mingled in with your site-search
functionality.
this being the case, our first conclusion is that everything related to site search is
important and should be optimized to the best of your ability. this includes everything
from the serp to the actual design of the search box, such as its width.
i've found that even when width testing is done, which to begin with is rare, it
rarely takes into consideration the actual search phrase. Usability studies from Jacob
nielsen has shown that users use longer queries when the search box is wider.
Going back to our dataset, let's dig into the site search data and look at the
number of searches per unique search query, as shown in Figure 13.11.
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Figure 13.11
Custom Searches per Search Phrase report
the report output is interesting on many levels, and when you look at the distri-
bution of this dataset, it very much looks like a standard long tail. But for now we have
a different interest in the data.
what we need to do now is determine how many characters (width) are needed
to accommodate a certain percentage of all search queries in full. to do so, follow
these steps:
1.
do a volume export of the data shown in Figure 13.11, which consists of a long
list of unique search phrases with the number of searches for each phrase.
