What to do with your holiday data

In the dynamic and competitive world of retail, shoppers expect a superlative customer experience, each and every time. Knowing your customer is critical to making the kind of choices that help generate conversion and a positive impact on new and returning shoppers. 

Testing and optimization is an ongoing process and a critical part of maximizing your search strategy and the capabilities of your AI-powered search and discovery technology. The post-holiday reset is an ideal period to review data and experiment and test new and existing implementations. 

It is also an opportunity to ask some simple but important questions and generate valuable insights that can improve ROI and the customer experience.

• How did my search strategy and implementation perform over the busy holiday season? 
• What can I do to improve it?

The search analytics audit

The first place to get the insights and hard numbers for traffic, conversions, and revenue data is by using the analytics your search or ecommerce platform provides.

A typical analytics audit will provide a summary of key benchmarks such as conversion rates, Average Order Value (AOV), and bounce rates. 
This data should also be segmented into two categories:

• Shoppers who use the search bar
• People who browse through catalog, category, or product listing pages (PLP)

This helps you and your teams identify some common search issues like slow load times (latency) and the relevance of search results.

The data you retrieve in your audit will help answer questions about search performance against six key criteria.

1. Maintaining consistency

Merchandising needs to be consistent across channels to maximize sale opportunities. 


Did omnichannel functionality work as it should with no critical discrepancies between web, mobile web, and mobile applications?

2. Manual curation alongside AI

AI augments the work your team is doing, but there are times when it is best to manually direct search results.

• Are you using your merchandising solution to manually curate specific parts of your catalog and applying AI-based optimizations to other areas?

AI can boost results based on real time data, such as pushing best-selling or high margin items to the top. But curated rules are great when it’s time to create an immersive brand experience and control sponsored items.

3. Long tail optimizations

When shoppers use longer search terms like “the best socks for my grandpa” — essentially reproducing the way they speak — the search query becomes more complex. Long tail queries are difficult to predict, and it is difficult to write rules and synonyms for all of them. To deal with the dilemma, your search solution needs to be optimized across three variables: 


• Query understanding: was your AI search able to parse the query using natural language processing (NLP)?
• Retrieval: did your AI search technology enable a hybrid approach that made use of AI-based vector search capabilities to deliver meaningful results for complex queries?
• Ranking: was AI ranking capable of reinforced learning and able to push results getting the most clicks, conversions, purchases, ratings to the top?

4. Instant indexing for accuracy

Up-to-date indexing ensures that the latest product varieties, prices, new SKUs, and inventory levels are accurately represented in the search results. Ultimately, indexing capabilities are a test of speed at scale.

• How effective was the search technology at reflecting critical updates such as product varieties, prices, new SKUs, and inventory levels? 
• Was your search solution able to handle frequent and massive changes, including schema updates, customer reviews, new merchants, etc., without affecting search speed and accuracy?

5. Performance and scalability

IT infrastructure is critical to ensuring that customers are being well served online particularly in periods of peak demand.

• Did the architecture allow you to scale without increasing spending to adjust systems?
• Was the infrastructure able to cope with surges in demand?
• Did systems remain robust, quick, reliable, and secure at all times?

6. Ability to easily manage site search tools

With deep knowledge of your brand and customer, merchandising and marketing teams have a leading role to play in shaping the online experience for customers. 

• Did merchandising and digital marketing teams have the tools to optimize search results and relevance quickly, without the need for IT support?
• Were data insights — product preferences, sale volumes, and browsing habits — available in real time?