How to Help Your Loyal Visitors Search - and Learn More About Them
Yet another Web 2.0 phenomenon is silently happening: the open source search plugins. You know the nifty search box on the top right hand corner of your Mozilla Firefox? It’s another great example how the user-generated DIY services are changing the way web works. The guys at Mycroft Project, for example, are making great effort to provide potential developers with information on how to code and test search plugins, host them, plus lots of other cool stuff.
Now you all might be well aware of search plugins provided for online goliaths such as Google, Yahoo!, Answers.com, eBay, LinkedIn, del.icio.us and the likes. But it is fascinating to find over 9,000 other search plugins in the Mycroft database - for just about any type of site you can think of, even the very small, local ones. Talking about the long tail..
So what do these plugins do? In one sentence, they bypass the need to use the insite search on the site. They let the users enter their search string in the integrated search box within the browser, and arrive at the search result page of a service as the landing page for their session. Thinking about web analytics, this is one interesting target group for segmentation purposes!
Do the plugin-searchers behave differently within your service? Are they more likely to convert than your average visitor? What is the length of their visit, and how often they return to your service? Does their keyword profile differ from others, and if so, how? What percentage of your search-driven visitor base comes from the plugins - and can that percentage be driven up?
Additionally, combining the plugin search with backends that can automatically drive search results based on the on-site user behaviour (such as WebSideStory Search spiced with their Active Ranking service, or Kefta’s Dynamic Targeting) add another layer of intelligence to drive conversion rates up.
If nothing else, you can at least have a positive brand boost by offering a well-coded search plugin on your site. If your loyal visitors see it as clever and cool, you can be quite sure to get your share of positive word-of-mouth.
And it’s dead easy - even for a rusty former frontend developer like myself, coding my very first search plugin took a mere hour, and was really a walk in the park. Another interesting aspect of this issue is that I’m not associated with the site I made the plugin for, neither with Mozilla developer community as such - even though I am enthusiastic about both.
Bottom line: when plugins that can significantly strengthen the dialogue between a service and the users become this easy to do and share, you should start thinking about every possible opportunity to use them. Help people that are enthusiastic about your brand or service take their loyalty to the next level!
