Improving share of search in a major UK retailer

Partnering with CommerceIQ helped this brand reverse-engineer a major retailer’s search algorithm to improve product ranking.

CHALLENGE

Each retailer has its own unique algorithm which delivers search results against your shoppers’ search terms. Over a third of a brand’s online sales will come through shoppers using the search function on the retailer sites and 95% of these come from the first page of search results.

Seeing sales growth decline, a global snacks brand set out to understand how to increase its share of search within a major UK retailer working together with the CommerceIQ Customer Success team. In this particular retailer, the inclusion of key terms within a brand’s product name has a significant impact on if and where your products will appear when a shopper is searching for them.

APPROACH

Using CommerceIQ Digital Shelf Analytics and partnering with the Customer Success team, the brand was able to reverse-engineer the algorithm and identify the key elements impacting organic search in the category and that were missing from the brand’s product names and product description pages.

Here are the three things the brand did using CommerceIQ data insights and Customer Success expertise:

1. Data-driven analysis: Perform a deep dive, at a subcategory level, to determine the key words that are influencing search results within the specific UK retailer
2. Setting ‘golden standards’: Identify and agree on ‘gold standard’ naming conventions. The naming convention needed to follow a clear hierarchy and ensure they contained all the information needed to convert a shopper as well as the key words critical to improve search results.
3. Strategic implementation & tracking: The brand updated product names to match the new ‘gold standard’ across its entire portfolio. It also set up tracking in the Digital Shelf Analytics dashboard to monitor the impact of this change over time and in comparison to other retailers.

RESULTS

After making these content changes, the brand saw substantial uplifts in their organic search placement across the UK retailer and thus increased its share of search.

Inspired by the impact of the changes, the brand asked the CommerceIQ Customer Success team to widen the scope of analysis and apply the learnings across other major UK retailers.