How Your Search Box Can Inform Marketing Strategy

Gaining insight into how your customers think and behave is essential for an effective marketing strategy. Yet customer research can be expensive and time consuming. Should you hire focus groups? Conduct customer surveys? Enlist help from a data analyst?

While each of those methods can be useful, the starting point to gathering customer intelligence should be easy and inexpensive for online retailers, who already have a window into customer intent and behaviors through the search function on their website. Site search data reflects what visitors actually do on your website — the search keywords they use, which products they click on in response to search results, and whether they buy the products for which they've searched. This is real data direct from consumer fingertips, not some educated guesses.