Interesting day yesterday as I had a chat with a journalist from RetailWeek and also attended a Chinwag:Live event – all around the topic of how search and recommendation play a role in helping people find what they want. I was actually remarkably quiet during the event, for a change, mainly because my ankle still hurts from falling down a mountain over the weekend – but that’s another story!
So back to the topic – to me of course, my mind applies this in the context of the shopping purchase cycle and how both methods play their part.
First, some definitions of the two approaches:
A: Search
We all know that most people’s journey’s start with visiting the “big G” and typing in a set of 2-4 keywords or phrases, ranging from “find me the best digital camera” to “places to eat near Covent Garden”. You will click one of the results, visit the page, and then continue your journey from there or hit the back button and try the next result down. All pretty familiar stuff. The argument of the search advocates is that this is all you ever need to find the information you are looking for, no matter where you are in the buying process.
B: Recommendation Sites
These try and take the concept of search further in having more detailed, vertical information, and having recommendation engines and social interaction to help people in a better way to find what they are looking for. Examples, of course, are Crowdstorm, TrustedPlaces, and TripAdvisor to name but a few. In these sites you either have a lot of information in one place about a product you are thinking of buying or you can interact with the people and the engine to help you actually make the decision process about what to buy.
So the crux of the argument is which approach is currently being used by the consumers and which is the best approach to give them the best experience.
I cover off some of the points raised in the event below:
1: Recommendation sites need search engines to drive any traffic to them
This one is hard to refute as 95%+ of journey’s start at a search engine and so if you don’t have good content to get ranked, you don’t get the traffic. End of story. Even if your site is good enough to establish a brand and get people coming back directly, even a majority of these people will be lazy and type your name into a search engine. It takes a good 4-5 years before a business is good enough to get people to come directly.
2: Search doesn’t take into account the stage of the purchasing cycle that someone is currently at.
Take the example of typing in “television reviews” – pretty easy to work out what they want but this type of search is tiny traffic compared to words like “televisions” and “sony televisions”. What actually is someone looking for when they type such a generic term – are they looking for product information, ideas to browse around, somewhere to buy it, the best prices and deals, reviews and opinions, or a mixture of all of them… there’s a wide range of possible places to send the visitor to. Search here can really fall down as it really is showing only sites that have designed their content for the search engines and not necessarily relevant content. Take price comparison as an example – how many times have you typed “best price digital cameras” into google and got a range of price comparison sites which you click through to only to find a set of rubbish results. Likewise, if you type “digital camera” into Google – how does looking at one review site or going to a merchant actually help you make that decision? It’s a complex scenario that I don’t think anyone has really nailed yet.
3: If retailers got their acts together, would anyone really need to use recommendation or review sites
A very interesting question. The argument is about where should all the juicy reviews, product information, and recommendations actually sit – at the search engine level, at a product recommendation site, a magazine review site, a price comparison engine, or the end retailer? Take an example: If I want to buy a new rucksack right now that is big enough to take around London for the day and very comfortable to wear on the back and under the arms – where do I go? If I type that into a search engine, I’m going to spend hours wading through crap. Likewise, a magazine review site may be interesting but they rarely cover a big range and you need to dig around a lot. A price comparison site is only going to show me a list of them with prices, and a retailer site will often just show me products with images and a price. It’s a little bit of “jump around a lot and try and fit lots of bits of info together”. Now, take the situation where a retailer site such as Webtogs (note: I’m a shareholder), reaches the point where every product has user reviews and ratings, and a whole section for “Expert advice and community” is created to help users, magazine publishers, and even retailers interact and help people in their purchase decisions, directly on the Webtogs site. Would you need to go anywhere else? Surely recommendation, review, and community sites only exist because retailers can’t or are scared to implement this kind of thing? You can argue that companies such as Reevoo and Bazaarvoice help by handling the review capture for retailers, but this is only a small part of the picture.
4: There are other forms of communication that can help in the buying process that miss out both search engines and recommendation sites altogether
Twitter was mentioned as a good example of this where someone asked their friends and followers “what digital slr should I buy made by Canon?” and got a raft of good responses. These ranged from actual product recommendations to pointing them to sites and discussion forums where people were already taking about this kind of thing and helping each other out. You also consider social environments such as facebook, blogs, and even traditional emails of course – and the bigger puzzle of how to interact with them. Are we actually trying something which is not possible by bringing all these communication methods together under one vertical site or product?
5: Do people really care about trust?
So one of the main arguments about why recommendation sites can top results from a search engine, is over the degree of trust they can utilise between sources and people. Google uses it’s algorithm to try and work out which sites are the most relevant and trusted by other “website owners” where as recommendation sites try and show reviews and comments filtered by trusted people in the community or network who have something valuable to say and not just trying to game the system. The question then becomes, do you trust reviews on a retailer site when you don’t know who the people are behind them, a site that comes up on Google just because it is in the listings, or do you prefer to know a bit about the people writing the content and why you should trust them. Perhaps we do, as our friends and colleagues are always trusted more than anonymous people. What would you prefer – 2 recommendations from a friend and colleague or 45 reviews from anonymous people? I haven’t found any data to support either side right now but it’s an interesting question nonetheless that needs some answers.
Conclusion
This entire space about how people choose and recommend products and services to each other is much more complicated than I ever imagined, and luckily I’m not the only one who thinks that! I think the issue really comes down to their being so many different ways and methods of researching things online and every type of site trying to work out where they fit into the equation. Should a price comparison site focus on that end step of finding the best price and buying or should they move more into product reviews and community?
Should retailers focus on despatching the goods to the customer and getting a good range of selection, or should they also be providiing reviews and community content and advice to help people make the right decision? Should recommendation sites fill the gaps they leave right now and if so, is it a long term solution? Finally, what about the mighty G – don’t they see themselves as the main gateway to the final destination sites and will do everything they can to own every single journey right up until the final purchase?
As Terry Pratchett once said “We live in interesting times…”
