The company
Hobbycraft are the largest arts and crafts retailer in the U.K., with products ranging across knitting, crochet, haberdashery, papercraft, baking, jewellery making, and more. As a specialist retailer, their search function is especially important for Hobbycraft, with over 1 million searches per month across 250,000 unique search terms.
The challenge
Hobbycraft wanted to launch a new version of their site search function, with the goal to help customers find the right products quickly and easily, and create a seamless online experience.
Before the launch, the Hobbycraft digital team wanted to be able to quantify the number of people using their search function and see how those people behaved on-site. However, with Google Analytics, they could only track users who viewed a search results page, not everyone who used the search function.
For example, visitors might click on a search suggestion and go straight to a product page, or get redirected directly from a search term—like when users search for ‘Christmas’, they are taken directly to the Christmas landing page.
Hobbycraft's website showing the search function
The solution
Using Contentsquare's Experience Analytics product, the digital team was able to create a segment of users who interacted with the search box itself, rather than those who viewed a search results page. They defined the behaviours separately on desktop and mobile, and then combined these to give a single view of who was interacting with the search.
From there, they built a dashboard in Contentsquare to get an overview of several metrics with that search usage as a starting point.
We can drill down so easily in Contentsquare to identify which device and channels are giving us the growth we need and which ones we actually need to deprioritize. This has helped contribute to our ecommerce sales growing double digits year after year.
The result
The dashboard listed stats based on the segment of searchers, including how much revenue they generated, number of visits, and conversion rate, which was then set that against total site visits, revenue, and conversion.
This gave them a better understanding of users who used the search function, so that when they launched their new version, they were able to clearly see its impact.
What's next
In addition to the search function, the digital team also tracked how other areas of the site were influenced by search behaviour.
In the first few days after launching the new search function, Contentsquare's Heatmaps analysis revealed the product recommendations panel—a carousel of products generated by the search engine section— on the homepage was underperforming compared to the old section.
Within days, they were able to trial a different set of products in the carousel, increasing revenue from that section by +80%.