MindFire: Increasing Conversions, One Search at a Time

MindFire (www.mindfireinc.com) develops web-based sales and marketing software that enable organizations to enhance their marketing efforts. They recently used ClickTracks to assist in the analysis of one of their client's sites, Learning Express.

Learning Express (www.learningexpress.com) is the largest retail franchise of specialty toys in the US. Founded in 1987, Learning Express offers a wide selection of educational toys and games for children. Offering quality products through more than 100 owner-operated stores in 35 states, Learning Express also sells through an e-commerce web site, part of a web sales and marketing suite powered by MindFire.

Before ClickTracks

MindFire had a strong hypothesis when approaching the Learning Express web site-implementing a more flexible and robust on-site search mechanism leads to larger sales. David Rosendahl, MindFire's VP of Client Services, knew that there was a direct correlation between the relevancy of search results and higher revenues.

Dave needed a way to clearly show the Learning Express team the economic value of a robust search mechanism as it applied to their own site. He used ClickTracks to compare and contrast two groups of Learning Express site visitors: those who utilized the on-site search box, and those who did not. And while the results weren't surprising to Dave, they went a long way in convincing Learning Express of the benefits to be gained by improving their on-site search functionality.

After ClickTracks

People can't buy a product if they can't locate it. To prove this point, Dave and his team used a 'control group' of data, tracking Learning Express's site visitors from January 1, 2003 through March 31, 2003. "The data showed us that of the xthousand people who visited the site, ythousand made a purchase. It basically allowed us to figure out the original conversion rate," said Dave.

After the initial analysis, Dave returned to ClickTracks and labeled site visitors based on whether or not they utilized the site's existing search capabilities. "ClickTracks very quickly showed that that visitors who came to the Learning Express web site and used the 'search' box had an astronomically higher conversion rate than those who didn't search," noted Dave. "For our 'control group', the conversion rate for 'searching' site visitors was x%, and for non-searching site visitors was y%. Looking at the data in ClickTracks, we were able to determine that the conversion rate for those who searched was 80% higher than those who didn't. Take into consideration the fact that the Learning Express search functionality wasn't as good as it could have been, and the numbers are even more astounding."

Since their 'experiment,' Dave and the MindFire team are in the process of making several enhancements to the Learning Express on-site search engine. The new Learning Express on-site search will have a greater tolerance for misspellings and will offer visitors the ability to perform thematic searches, among other improvements. Will Dave use ClickTracks on his next client web site? Yep! "I've used WebTrends…but it presents the data in a different format. We could've written a script to parse the log files, but ClickTracks made it so easy we couldn't resist!" concluded Dave.