Good Search Abandonment: Delivering Content without Clicks to the Cross-channel Customer

In July, Googlers Jane Li, Scott Huffman and Akihito Tokuda proposed to their peers in information retrieval at SIGIR 2009 that there might be such a thing as good abandonment, or:

An abandoned [search] query for which the user’s information need was successfully addressed by the search results page, with no need to click on a result or refine the query.

Their conclusion was based on an analysis of thousands of Google queries in the U.S., China and Japan, in which it was observed that when the answer to the searcher's query was successfully retrieved and displayed in a snippet of information on the search engine results page (SERP), the user clicked through at a much lower than expected conversion rate for a successful search.

An example of good search abandonment would be to google a business with the intention of finding the address. The Google result returns the street address, the business telephone number, and even a summary of starred reviews when applicable -- all the information the user needs to make a reservation and find the location on a map. This user won’t be clicking through to the website, but that doesn’t mean that the search has failed.

The concept of good abandonment flies in the face of “capturing the click” and suggests that there are times, chiefly when the user is searching for quick hits of information like stock quotes, weather forecasts, locations and telephone numbers, when the search query is successful even if the user doesn’t click through on a valid hit. In fact, if a user can acquire the information without clicking through, then the search query could be considered more successful than a search in which a user clicks through to the site but must browse through several screens before he acquires the information he seeks.

At first glance it might appear that good abandonment has no applicability for e-commerce where success metrics hinge on the number of transactions that are driven through the site, and where attracting qualified traffic has long been (and should remain) the goal of the online marketer.

But given that conversion is measured as a ratio of completed transactions to visitors, along with the fact that the holidays are upon us and servers are already starting to groan with an onslaught of seasonal traffic, it's worth considering whether there may be times when your customer is better served by a snippet of information rather than a click and a full page download.

Good abandonment is an option in those cases where 1) the customer already knows your brand and 2) she needs to know something straightforward and essential about your business: like your 1-800 number or your holiday store hours. It would never be wise to turn away customers who are seeking your goods and services -- those are the clicks you must capture -- but for the customer who simply needs to contact Customer Service? Receiving that information within the Google result, rather than requiring them to click through and ferret it out, puts them in touch with your business much more quickly -- and that’s good customer service.

So what do your customers want to know?

1. Check your search logs for informational queries as well as aggressive browsing to and departures from informational screens like Contact Us and Return Policies that might indicate the customer found what she needed and moved on. Each nugget of information that your customer seeks on your site presents an opportunity to serve your customer better.

Once you’ve identified the top informational hits, misses, and pages:

2. Optimize the information so that it indexes well and presents the relevant snippet of information directly within third-party search engine results.  Information that attracts sizable traffic deserves its own page with the answer to the often asked question near the top of the screen, along with significant keywords and descriptive phrases in the body of the text and tucked away in the metadata.

While you’re at it:

3. Create a more effective landing page. Not all customers will abandon the query -- many will still click though, and you’ve just identified the pages that they will hit the most frequently in this context. Make the most of the opportunity by shoring up the page with additional supporting information, relevant links and even some cross-sell merchandising to your top-sellers or new arrivals. If you haven’t yet set up a keyword redirect to ensure that your product-centric on-site search engine is redirecting to the informational page, now would be a great time to do that too.

Paying attention to good search abandonment isn’t about new customer acquisition -- it's about bolstering retention and reciprocity in cross-channel customers who know you by name, and simply need a quick point of reference to help them plan their task -- which may well include a visit to your brick and mortar storefront, the address of which they just acquired in a swiftly executed, and then quickly abandoned, search.

Dayna Bateman is a Sr. Strategic Analyst for Fry, Inc.

For more on good abandonment see: Good Abandonment in Mobile and PC Internet Search, Jane Li, Scott Huffman, Akihito Tokuda, 32nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, 2009, pp. 43-50. In their paper the Google team points out that good search abandonment will become increasingly important to U.S. mobile search users whose search context is considerably different from desktop searchers.