Speakers: Nick Crumlett
What problem was your company dealing with before HawkSearch?
Nick Crumlett: The problem that MiSUMi was trying to solve in implementing HawkSearch was a low click through rate, high bounce rate on our keyword search results. This is mostly coming from an antiquated solar system that we had. In addition, we had a quite a bit of data drift and data problems that the HawkSearch platform actually provided us an opportunity in using their workbench to work through and work around. Some of those problems that we knew were going to take quite a bit of time for us to improve. This gave us a bridge to natural improvement of the keyword search before the data quality improvements could occur.
How did HawkSearch help resolve this challenge?
Nick Crumlett: We recognized early on that many of the data problems that we had were really translation problems, terminology problems. As many of our products came from the Japanese market and were translated, most of them were supplier terms that were translated improperly. We need a wholesale switch to many industrial terms. So what the HawkSearch platform allowed us to do was to essentially use the synonym library build up synonyms for not only the terms that we were using and that our customers were used to using, but also those that were more common in the US marketplace. This led to a much higher results rate, much more relevant results rate on our keyword searches and therefore a much higher click through and conversion rate on those searches as well.
What results did you get with HawkSearch?
Nick Crumlett: We've been live with HawkSearch for about seven months now and we've noticed several trends that have kept up all seven months. One at, at first was concerning was a reduction in total number of searches on our website and through a little bit more research, we found that this was a reduction in the procession searches from 2.6 to 2.2 per session which we are postulating is a result of less thrashing or repeat searching when poor results are found on the first search. Because all the rest of the metrics are keeping up very well. we're seeing an 18% increase in click through rate, we're seeing over 80% increase in our conversion rate. We have two conversions that we track. One is a download of a CAD for our engineer customers and one is the this traditional add to cart. The downloaded CAD is up approximately 72% and the add to cart is up approximately 88% with the total number of clicks up as well. Even though the total number of searches is down, the total number of conversion clicks and the percentage of those conversions are both up over the seven months that we've been live with HawkSearch.
Did HawkSearch improve anything specific that has helped your website?
Nick Crumlett: One of the poorest performing aspects of our legacy search, the solar search that we had was a no results found occurred too frequently. It was occurring about 12% of searches. And this was primarily, we believe due to the terminology differences between the translated values that we got from our Japanese headquarters to the US market. They just weren't aligning and not only through the, the use of the synonyms but also just in the stemming engine that HawkSearch has we noticed that there really are no, no results found anymore. We have been actually looking for them and not finding them. We are still working on relevance for some of those, but for the most part, we've seen a marked improvement in the no results found across the board since implementing HawkSearch.
Do you use boost and bury rules and can you tell us how that's improved the search experience on your website?
Nick Crumlett: So for boost and bury, we're really just starting to scratch the surface on this. It is an important initiative that we have on our road map just coming in at a lower priority than our, our terminology changes, and making sure that we have valid results to begin with. It is important for MiSUMi specifically, we have over 75,000 parent products and over 4.5 million part numbers on our website. So that relevance is, something that we definitely are interested in utilizing more. We have some limited use on some of our top keywords, and we are seeing that those boost rules and the pinning rules are helping to drive traffic to a greater extent on those pages. We've seen approximately 10% improvement on the pages where we have implemented a boost and bury or a pinning rule just to the increased relevance. And this is also something that we have utilized the reporting features within HawkSearch to determine if and when a boost rule is necessary and how one is performing over time. So it's definitely getting both ends of getting a recommendation for a boost rule and also being able to track how a boost rule is operating on the website.
