Speaker: Ilsa Heinicke Huscher, Ecommerce Manager at Borsheims
What problem was your company dealing with before HawkSearch?
Ilsa Heinicke Huscher: We had a couple of problems that we were trying to solve for when, when looking for a new search and personalization provider. The primary one was the inability to support indexed facets. So if we wanted to index for a longer tailed search term like diamond hoop earrings, there was a lot of manual category creation there that was pretty time consuming. We also lacked a lot of customizable and rule based features like in line banners. We weren't able to display those for for search results. We didn't have geographic rules or other rule sets that we could display those for. The redirects that we had with our past software were, were pretty laggy. And we found sometimes the search intent wasn't really there. Like if somebody searched for a ruby necklace, ruby pendant wouldn't necessarily show in the results. We also weren't able to customize filters and header text for search results or other landing page campaigns that weren't tied to a structured category page. And finally, we had some kind of slow indexing for our product catalog
How did HawkSearch help resolve this challenge?
Ilsa Heinicke Huscher: We've really appreciated HawkSearch's SEO traffic builder giving us the control to index landing pages and faceted combinations of those pages to really grow our site map in a smart intentional way. We also really love the merchandizing flexibility with content items and campaigns which allows us to display all kinds of different content from in line banners to variations on facets to larger merchandise sections, almost like things that we would create in a CMS across various pages and, and URLs on our site.
What results did you get with HawkSearch? Please share quantifiable metrics if possible.
Ilsa Heinicke Huscher: Yeah, we've seen some good results with HawkSearch. Our conversion rate remains greater for customers that use search versus those that do not. One of our most exciting metrics is that we're seeing growth over 10% year over year for some of the categories that we've really applied a lot of visual merchandizing to using content items.
Can you think of a poorly performing search phase that HawkSearch helped improve?
Ilsa Heinicke Huscher: I can't think of any specific word or term that had recurring poor search results prior to HawkSearch. But in general, I would say that search results have improved. Some kind of broader examples would be searches for components of a product, attributes such as color, measurements. The search seems to be a little bit more intelligent in detecting synonyms like pendant, necklace, things like that, that capture the customer intent of what they're looking for even though it may not match literally with the data in the product.
Why did you choose HawkSearch over the competition?
Ilsa Heinicke Huscher: We ultimately chose HawkSearch because of the traffic builder feature that allowed us to index our faceted pages. HawkSearch was really the only provider that knew what we were looking for when we started, talking about that and what our goals were. and that's something that's offered out of box and others that we talked to kind of gave us iffy answers on whether we'd be able to accomplish what we want. But SEO is really ingrained into HawkSearch's product and that's why we ultimately went with Hawk.
