Search and discovery are crucial to any ecommerce site and omnichannel strategy. The right product discovery solution can single-handedly increase conversions, boost revenues, improve customer loyalty and deliver better customer experiences. But how do you know if your product discovery experience is good enough?
Measuring how well your product discovery is performing all comes down to data. Using metrics to track performance and benchmarking these insights against your business goals with Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Let’s explore how to measure the success of your product discovery experience.
What is product discovery?
Product discovery is the process of helping shoppers find their desired product and content. A comprehensive product discovery platform uses various tools such as AI-powered search, smart merchandising and relevant recommendations to power exceptional product discovery journeys.
Before you go full-steam ahead on optimising your product discovery, you should be clear on what goals you want to achieve – otherwise how do you know your product discovery solution is performing well?
Whether you want to increase average order values (AOV), boost conversion rates or improve customer satisfaction is up to you. Having this direction and pin-pointing your goals of product discovery will ensure it’s fine-tuned for both you and your customers. For example, one of your goals might be to increase sales by 10% in Q3. The KPIs to track, analyse and benchmark are conversion rate, site traffic and daily sales.
The list of metrics you can use to benchmark performance is a long one. We’re going to focus on what we think provides the best indication of success – click-through rate (CTR), engagement and conversions.
CTR is the percentage of impressions that result in a click. This metric can be used to evaluate how well search is performing in guiding shoppers to their desired products.
A high CTR indicates the product is relevant to the shoppers initial search and matches the keywords entered well. On the other hand, a low CTR shows the results aren’t relevant and the search tool doesn’t understand the shopper.
The CTR also shows how well a product is ranked, merchandised and personalised on a product listing page (PLP). If the CTR for a product which is ranked first on a PLP is low, the merchandiser can move this item down and place another relevant item in the first position to encourage purchases.
CTR gives you clear insight into what works well and what doesn’t. For example, Superdry found that their search product detail page click rates soared by 61% when they leveraged AI-powered search to understand complicated and long-tail searches. This gave Superdry the confidence to continue to roll out AI-search across their online stores.
Engagement tracks the level of interaction a shopper has with your site. If your engagement is high, your customers are interested in your brand and value what you do. So it’s no surprise that engaged customers are more likely to convert. In fact, a study by Rosetta found engaged consumers buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction and are 5 times more likely to only buy from that brand in the future.
The more time a shopper spends interacting with your brand, the more they’ll trust you. It’s a form of relationship-building that can earn you loyalty as well as higher conversions, and since acquiring new customers is 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining existing ones it’s extremely valuable.
More engagements with your audience also gives you the opportunity to learn more about them. This data is vital for the smooth running of everything from your AI and automations to your personalisation and re-engagement.
From this data you can optimise the product discovery journey until it turns one-off browsers into loyal customers.
Conversions are the best way to measure your product discovery experience as they signal the number of people that click on your site and end up as a paying customer.
Tracking only this number gives you insight into your customers’ journey, which channel they prefer to use and where the product discovery experience can be improved. To maximise the benefits of tracking conversions, find your benchmarks so you can accurately measure success. For example, average ecommerce conversion rates sit at around 2.5-3%.
Conversions are often used as KPI’s. One of Amara’s KPIs was to boost conversions from search, personalisation and merchandising. By automating systems, they could strategically display rich product category pages that respond to customer behaviour whilst the merchandising team could focus on creative control. This resulted in a 5x forecasted conversion uplift, which gave Amara the verification to replicate this strategy across their global sites.
Using accurate metrics and benchmarking the performance of your ecommerce site provides a clear indication of the success of your product discovery experience. This valuable insight highlights where you can tweak poor performing strategies and replicate the lucrative ones for continuous optimisation.
Beyond delivering better customer experiences, you can optimise based on KPIs to improve your bottom line and provide a clear business case for introducing new technologies such as AI and automation.
