jsinger - 1:29 pm on Aug 15, 2006 (gmt 0)

Questions: 1 How do you know they've given up? 2 What exactly are you tracking if you're not tracking category level clicks?

Our monitoring software records text searches by keyword, IP and time. We can see how many results were returned. (often none, or sometimes far too many to be very useful) "Giving up" means they've stopped entering keywords in the search form. Then they either leave our site or drill down thru category links which probably works for most customers. Our site is quite targeted with only a few hundred products.

"I can't get over how stupid some customers can be in searching." Are you sure someone isn't testing your site search tool?

Well I've been busy testing other sites' search tools, so I guess that happens. :) But I don't just enter one keyword. I often test in singular and plural to see how searches handle those. The ones at our site are real customer searches with maybe an occasional supplier or competitor.