Preparing a sales campaign on the search side
Sales, Black Friday, a new range: traffic rises, and with it the cost of every search that fails. Here's what to check before, during and after — an hour in total.
Two weeks before: vocabulary
A campaign brings in an audience that doesn't know your catalog. Their words aren't yours, and your engine has never seen them.
Open your zero-result searches for the last three months and work through the top rows. Every synonym created now is worth more than one created during the campaign, once the traffic has already passed.
If you're launching a new range, add its terms before it goes live: brand, commercial name, the abbreviations your sales team uses. Your customers will use them too.
One week before: existing rules
Time to review your merchandising rules. Last year's campaign may have left products pinned to searches where they no longer belong.
The catalog rules tab lists them all, with their creation date. Those dating from a finished campaign are better deleted than corrected.
The day before: check what your customers see
Take your ten most frequent searches and type them into the preview. You see exactly what a visitor will see, without leaving the console.
Two things to look at: do your promoted products appear on the searches that concern them, and are your out-of-stock items squatting the top positions.
During: the zero-result rate
One indicator is enough to monitor. If it climbs, the audience your campaign brought in is looking for things the engine can't find — and every hour counts.
The fix is quick: a synonym is created and applies immediately, with no reindexing and no technical work.
After: what to undo
A promotion ends; its rules don't. That's the most common mistake, and the quietest: nobody notices a product still pinned three months later.
Note the end date somewhere, or get into the habit of reviewing your rules at the start of each month.
What the campaign teaches you
Your zero-result searches during a traffic peak are worth more than market research: they tell you what people came to buy from you and didn't find.
Some merchants find their next catalog additions there. It's the one benefit of a campaign that outlasts it.