This story starts a few months ago with a tale of frustration, and a considerable amount of swearing. Nothing new, I use f*ck like it’s an exclamation mark. However, on this occasion the swearing was both used in frustration and absolute amazement.
I gave up alcohol in February. Which meant I was looking for sensible replacements for alcohol to sup in the evening. A visit to a (reasonably) local M&S Food store led me to the following drink.
I fell in love with this drink, because for some reason it actually tastes like rose water (probably my brain). I thought this was great, because I get my grocery shopping from Ocado who stock products from M&S. Which is great because it means I don’t need to drive 20 minutes each way to go get my drink fix.
Next shopping day, I remembered these drinks, and remembered the big label up the front said “Juicy”. So that’s what I searched for and it did not find what I was looking for.
Smidge of context here, I do my grocery shopping upstairs, in my office, usually in a panic before I miss the cut off time. I rarely run up and downstairs to check things.
So I assumed that they didn’t stock it, maybe it’s because it was new and they hadn’t listed it yet.
Now this went on for a couple of months, until I found the product completely by accident, while looking for something else.
The problem? The word “Juicy”. I had mistakenly assumed it was a sub-brand name for the product.
I’d also assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that Ocado has a robust synonym strategy. And this my friend is likely to be costing them a sh*t ton of money (but I’ll get to that).
What the f*ck is a synonym?
A synonym is a word that is another way of saying another word. It’s also a seriously powerful tool that site search engines use to help people get to things easily.
It’s a work around if the site doesn’t have metadata or if the metadata can’t be read.
It’s a way of supercharging search to make it behave like it’s a mind reader. Cool, eh?
In the case of Ocado, what they *should* have done was add a synonym that was a distinguishing feature of the can, i.e. the big fat f*ck off word “Juicy” on the can.
OK but why is this costing them money?
Right, let’s do a bit of Emma maths. By that I mean it’s where I have an idea, do a bit of googling then whiz up a spreadsheet to do the maths my fingers can’t cope with.
First of all, I googled how many active customers Ocado have.
Answer = 980,000 active customers who regularly place a grocery order with them, usually weekly. I’m one of them.
Then I did a bit of hypothesising.
A pack of those drinks costs £4. Which meant for me at least, they were missing out of £4 basket spend every two weeks (because I’m not going to buy them weekly).
Now, can you imagine if almost every person who shopped from them couldn’t find something they wanted every week? Let’s put a figure on that, let’s say 80% of customers, which is 752,000 customers.
Now we don’t know what the value of those items are. Some are going to be higher and some much lower. So let’s go with £3 as the average for each of those 752,000 customers.
So what does that look like?
Yup, you read that right, £2.25Million. Per week.
That’s what missing synonyms has the potential to cost their business on a weekly basis. I don’t know about you buy I don’t think I could afford to leave that much money on the table each week.
That’s a simple fix tho?
Well, yeah, it is to me anyway. My brain is hard wired to find the synonyms in amongst all the information about something. It’s also thinking about how different types of people find information.
You can start with a simple word like Juicy, and you can extend to how you funnel people. So a clever person might also include “sober curious”. And a really clever person would include “Stoptober” from mid-September to early November.
Synonyms are one part, understanding how and went to use them is the other.
How can you help?
If you’ve taken one look at this and are now having a bit of a panic about how your site search is working, fear not!
At Wolf Peach I’ve developed services to help you out with your site search conundrums. Whether you need help designing a supercharged search solution or if you want someone to take the pain of managing your site search month-to-month off your hands, we can help.
