Improving search improves business
Gartner Digital Market’s Capterra is a great place for users to research software for their needs and also a great place for software vendors to find people to buy their software, but like most websites, it had a generic and basic search.
The goal for Capterra and for the search was to be ridicuolusly helpful. This very basic search missed the bar. It was minimally helpful. And it was leaving millions of dollars in revenue on the table.
This is a very common issue. Companies think search is a solved problem and often find a library to do the search for them and call it a day. Very few design, engineering, and product resources are put towards improving the search experience. But search is actually an area where great optimization can still happen and should be happening.
There are two broad kinds of users – navigators and searchers. For the latter, you want to provide as high-quality a search as possible because they don’t want to make use of your fancy navigation, quizzes, information architecture, etc.
The Capterra search wasn’t a bad search, but it had technical and design shortcomings that hurt conversions and caused people to get frustrated and leave. These issues could translate to millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Capterra has more than 50,000 products with more than 2,000,000 reviews across more than 900 software categories. Improving the search experience has great potential to improve the user experience and business outcomes.
When we looked at the situation from a product perspective, we had both user experience and technical issues that were holding us back. We needed to attack both of them.
The problems with the search
High level of search exits
Click through rate wasn’t where we wanted it
Post-search pageviews were lower than expected
If the search couldn’t find anything, we didn’t try to help you further
We didn’t correct for misspellings (very common when app and tech company names are often strangely spelled!)
Above is the old search. Here, a search query returned no results. There should be basically no situation where a website like this returns no results. That’s a recipe for user abandonment.
And even if a website legitimately can’t find any results, there should be a call to action to do something else that can help a user. This could be to browse categories to refine search, enter a wizard to help figure out what a user needs, etc.
Calls to action. Always.
How did we improve search?
Showed fewer “no results” situations and helped recommend products they may have been attempting to find
Made the results more direct so that users could find what they were looking for quickly and with more confidence
Speed up the page speed of search (our data showed that every additional second a page load or operation took resulted in a big jump in people leaving the site)
What was the outcome?
Reduction in search exists
Increase in conversion rates from search landing page
Large increase in traffic from search to compare and product landing pages, two high-conversion pages that demonstrate the value of Capterra very well
Users found the search empowering and were more likely to use it again in the future
The improved search experience above shows how these changes led to lower user abandonment, higher click-throughs, and more conversions. In this instance, the user misspelled PowerPoint. We should be able to easily correct this and get them the correct software.
Then the search page links to the software category pages, which gave us another call to action to keep them on the site and take another crack at helping them.