Skip to content
Logo-black
  • Native Commerce Core™
    • IDC-marketscape-q4-2024-resources-hub-cover-562x562@2x

      Constructor is a leader in the IDC marketscape

      Constructor is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape on Worldwide Knowledge Discovery Software for External-Facing Use Cases, 2024.

        • Search & Autosuggest

          Hyper-personalized ecommerce search driven by AI and real-time shopper behavior.

        • Browse

          Personalize your ecommerce category pages for maximum conversions.

        • Recommendations

          Drive upsells and increase RPV with hyper-personalized product recommendations.

        • Collections

          Dynamic, personalized ecommerce collection pages that learn from every search, click, and purchase.

        • Quizzes

          Create smart product recommendation quizzes that drive shopper engagement.

        • Merchant Controls & Intelligence

          Get the ecommerce merchandising controls and insights you need to make high-impact changes that drive revenue.

        • Attribute Enrichment

          Automatically enrich product attributes and categories to give shoppers the best possible experience.

        • AI Shopping Assistant

          Help your online customers discover great products faster.

        • Retail Media

          Constructor Sponsored Listings complement (instead of compete with) your organic results.

        • Cross-Channel & Offsite Discovery

          Create and launch personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns across digital channels.

        • B2B Use-Cases

          Product discovery technology that’s purpose-built to handle the complex needs of B2B ecommerce.

  • Customers
    • A_B Testing Navigation Image

      The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing for Search & Discovery

      Discover what your ecommerce team needs to know about fixing broken testing strategies, avoiding wasted effort, and unlocking the full value of A/B testing.

        • Upcoming Events

          Visit us in person at ecommerce industry events.

        • Reports & Guides

          New research, guidance, and insights for the future of retail.

        • Webinars

          Educational webinars, conversations with Constructor partners, and more.

        • Blog

          The latest ideas and news from the frontier of commerce search and discovery.

        • Split/Test Digest

          The most interesting learnings from A/B testing at Constructor.

        • News

          Read Constructor's latest news coverage and press announcements.

        • Documentation

          Learn about the components of Constructor's advanced, AI-powered product discovery suite.

        • About Us

          With AI in our DNA and by keeping ecommerce as our core focus, we’ve built the best product search and discovery solution specifically for the unique needs of retailers.

        • Partners

          Constructor partners with the world’s top retail consultants, systems integrators, and technology platforms.

        • Careers

          Constructor is building the next generation of search solutions.

Login
Book a Demo
  • Native Commerce Core™
    • IDC-marketscape-q4-2024-resources-hub-cover-562x562@2x

      Constructor is a leader in the IDC marketscape

      Constructor is a Leader in the IDC MarketScape on Worldwide Knowledge Discovery Software for External-Facing Use Cases, 2024.

        • Search & Autosuggest

          Hyper-personalized ecommerce search driven by AI and real-time shopper behavior.

        • Browse

          Personalize your ecommerce category pages for maximum conversions.

        • Recommendations

          Drive upsells and increase RPV with hyper-personalized product recommendations.

        • Collections

          Dynamic, personalized ecommerce collection pages that learn from every search, click, and purchase.

        • Quizzes

          Create smart product recommendation quizzes that drive shopper engagement.

        • Merchant Controls & Intelligence

          Get the ecommerce merchandising controls and insights you need to make high-impact changes that drive revenue.

        • Attribute Enrichment

          Automatically enrich product attributes and categories to give shoppers the best possible experience.

        • AI Shopping Assistant

          Help your online customers discover great products faster.

        • Retail Media

          Constructor Sponsored Listings complement (instead of compete with) your organic results.

        • Cross-Channel & Offsite Discovery

          Create and launch personalized, data-driven marketing campaigns across digital channels.

        • B2B Use-Cases

          Product discovery technology that’s purpose-built to handle the complex needs of B2B ecommerce.

  • Customers
    • A_B Testing Navigation Image

      The Ultimate Guide to A/B Testing for Search & Discovery

      Discover what your ecommerce team needs to know about fixing broken testing strategies, avoiding wasted effort, and unlocking the full value of A/B testing.

        • Upcoming Events

          Visit us in person at ecommerce industry events.

        • Reports & Guides

          New research, guidance, and insights for the future of retail.

        • Webinars

          Educational webinars, conversations with Constructor partners, and more.

        • Blog

          The latest ideas and news from the frontier of commerce search and discovery.

        • Split/Test Digest

          The most interesting learnings from A/B testing at Constructor.

        • News

          Read Constructor's latest news coverage and press announcements.

        • Documentation

          Learn about the components of Constructor's advanced, AI-powered product discovery suite.

        • About Us

          With AI in our DNA and by keeping ecommerce as our core focus, we’ve built the best product search and discovery solution specifically for the unique needs of retailers.

        • Partners

          Constructor partners with the world’s top retail consultants, systems integrators, and technology platforms.

        • Careers

          Constructor is building the next generation of search solutions.

Login
Book a Demo
Back to Blog

Simplify eCommerce Prioritization with Clickstream Analysis (Plus an Easy Shortcut)

Posted on:
April 27, 2020
Author:
Constructor Team
Table of Contents:

It’s a confusing process.

As someone who manages eCommerce experiences, you have 1,000 competing priorities, and it’s nigh impossible to rank them all.

In the midst of dealing with fulfillment, checkout, paid advertising and many other priorities, how can you find time to make sure you do everything you can to get users to the products they’ll buy?

  • Should you invest in machine learning and personalization? If so, how do you do it?
  • Which product discovery improvements should you prioritize?  Search? Browse? Recommendations?
  • When do users struggle to get to the product they want? Which queries are most frustrating to your users? Where are they getting stuck? If you solved their frustrations, what would the outcome be?
  • Do you even have the time, patience, and budget to test complex improvements on top of everything else?

With so many potential business objectives on your hands, you need a way to effectively discover, evaluate and rank new opportunities in product discovery without expending all of your team’s resources.

We’ve partnered with dozens of enterprise retailers over the last 5 years. Time and time again, we’ve found the best way to inform priorities is to dive into the user clickstream data — but that’s neither quick, nor easy.

That’s why we’ve developed a process that provides retailers tangible insights into their discovery gaps and opportunities — without requiring any commitment to a contract or that they devote any team resources.

How to Simplify Retail Decision Making (And Achieve Unforgettable Product Discovery Experiences)

Before we dive into the process of clickstream analysis, let’s first answer the question:

What is clickstream?

We define clickstream as data on the actions each user takes on your website — what action each user takes — whether it’s searching, browsing a category page, clicking, adding to cart and purchasing.

Clickstream analysis is the process of gathering and analyzing the clickstream data from your users to help you understand and plan critical business objectives. In other words, clickstream analysis allows you to find and plan the tasks that will result in the best outcomes.

How Clickstream Analysis Can Help You Make Decisions

At its simplest, clickstream data can provide myriad insights into your search and discovery experiences:

  • Where are users getting stuck on your site? What browse pages, search result pages, etc. do users not convert on? How can these pages improve and what would be the outcome of those improvements?
  • What pathways do users take to find specific products? How can those pathways be optimized to ensure users find what they’re looking for in the quickest time possible?
  • Where are users seeing zero-result pages? When they do hit zero-result pages, how do they refine their searches?
  • How do a user’s geographic location, time of day, etc. affect their purchasing decisions? How do these factors play into the difficulties they may experience in the above examples?

…but that’s only the starting point. Machine learning is now expanding the possibilities of clickstream analysis, allowing many companies to answer complicated questions:

  • What are the best positions for any given item within any given query to maximize business KPIs that we care about?
  • What are the best positions for any given item in a result set for any given user? What is the outcome of introducing personalization?
  • What would be the outcome of tailoring each user’s experience across the entire product discovery experience (search, autosuggest, browse, recommendations)?

Use Case #1: Grocery Retailer

We recently worked with a popular grocery retailer who struggled to achieve their eCommerce goals, particularly in the realm of search and discovery.

After helping the grocer set up a simple system for capturing and analyzing their clickstream data (we’ll discuss this system shortly), one glaring issue was presented to us immediately:

While zero-result rates were low, frustrated search counts (i.e. searches where users bounced after searching any specific query, or reformulated their search) were high.

This was a clear sign of sub-par search results. The upside to resolving the issue was clear, so we made solving it a priority.

After analyzing the data, we were able to implement systems which used the reformulated search data (and more) to automatically correct the search results across hundreds of queries.

Use Case #2: Apparel Retailer

Bonobos, a popular apparel retailer, also recently came to us with issues surrounding many of the same concerns we mentioned previously.

After analyzing Bonobos’ clickstream data, we found that:

  • Long-tail queries received lower clickthrough rates and purchase rates
  • Recommendations and browse results were receiving comparatively low click through rates and average order values
  • Some popular products like Weekday Warrior dress pants weren’t being discovered due to user confusion

Without conducting the proper clickstream analysis, finding and fixing these issues would most likely have never happened and Bonobos would have never realized the benefits of resolving them. 

The challenge of collecting and analyzing clickstream data

Many companies don’t know exactly what data they have on their users — and even if they do, they struggle to make the sort of data-driven prioritization decisions to optimize search and browse.

Some log and store user data into database cold storage in batches (not in real-time) for economic reasons, which means their data is out of touch with what users are actually doing on the site. They aren’t in a place where they can effectively use their data to improve search and discovery, and this causes them to incorrectly evaluate the outcomes of search improvements (or just ignore the idea of improving search altogether).

On top of the difficulties of collecting and using clickstream data, there are many questions left unanswered:

  • “How highly should I prioritize search and discovery improvements?”
  • “Are my search & browse pages doing all they can to drive conversions?”
  • “Is machine learning applicable with my catalog size and monthly visitors?”
  • “Is now really the best time to experiment with more advanced search and discovery systems?”
  • “Do I even have the time, patience, and budget to test complex search improvements on top of everything else?”

That’s why we developed the Constructor Beacon.

Constructor Beacon

The beacon is a two-line snippet of JavaScript that takes your clickstream data, feeds it into Constructor’s machine learning models, and presents you with a panoramic overview of improvements you’d see by implementing machine learning in your search — as well as the low-hanging value you can capture today.

The Beacon also gives you insights into your user behavior patterns:

  • Where are users getting stuck on your site?
  • What pathways do users take to find specific products?
  • What are patterns of product attribute affinities across search results, browse pages, and in terms of geography and interest graph?
  • Across all touchpoints, where is product ranking upside-down? Meaning, where do users interest and your ranking diverge?
  • Where are users seeing zero-result or frustrating result pages — and when users hit those pages, how do they refine their searches successfully or unsuccessfully?

Various Constructor dashboards for frustrated searches and Interact mode data

The process for installing the Beacon is simple, and can be completed in the span of 2 to 5 minutes as shown in the video below:

 

There are no front-end or back-end changes that take place after the Beacon is installed — our systems will take care of the rest. Whether you’re making changes to your back-end, re-platforming, or anything else, Beacon will stay up-and-running without interfering with other important tasks.

……

Now more than ever, we believe in providing true value and insights with the Beacon. Improving your search and discovery experiences shouldn’t cause confusion — we all have enough of that on our hands already.

Interested in installing the Beacon on your retail site? Shoot us an email today. 

Subscribe to our Blog

Get conversion-driving insights delivered straight to your inbox.

What's next?

Uncover lost revenue opportunities with a complimentary Search Experience Audit.

According to the 2024 State of Ecommerce Search & Product Discovery Survey, nearly 70% of shoppers think the search function on retail websites needs an upgrade. Our team has run over 1000 A/B tests to identify easy-to-implement algorithmic and UX improvements that get results. Use their research to your advantage with a complimentary Search Experience Audit — no strings attached.

Request an Audit
  • Analyze your search results quality
  • Identify "no results" pages
  • Pinpoint irrelevant results for long-form queries
  • Uncover UX opportunities for Search, Autocomplete, and PLPs

According to the 2024 State of Ecommerce Search & Product Discovery Survey, nearly 70% of shoppers think the search function on retail websites needs an upgrade. Our team has run over 1000 A/B tests to identify easy-to-implement algorithmic and UX improvements that get results. Use their research to your advantage with a complimentary Search Experience Audit — no strings attached.

Request an Audit
  • MACH Certified
  • 21972-312_SOC_NonCPA-150x150
  • Cartification-mark_04-09-300x253-1-150x150
Constructor.io Logo
  • Technology
    • Native Commerce Core™
    • Request a Demo
    • The Proof Schedule®
  • Solutions
    • Search & Autosuggest
    • Browse
    • Recommendations
    • Collections
    • Quizzes
    • Merchant Controls & Intelligence
    • Attribute Enrichment
    • AI Shopping Assistant
    • B2B Solutions
  • Resources Hub
    • Events
    • Reports, Guides & Webinars
    • Blog
    • Experiments
    • News
    • Constructor vs Alternatives
    • Documentation
  • About
    • About Us
    • Partners
    • Security & Compliance
    • Careers
  • Technology
    • Native Commerce Core™
    • Request a Demo
    • The Proof Schedule®
  • Solutions
    • Search & Autosuggest
    • Browse
    • Recommendations
    • Collections
    • Quizzes
    • Merchant Controls & Intelligence
    • Attribute Enrichment
    • AI Shopping Assistant
    • B2B Solutions
  • Resources Hub
    • Events
    • Reports, Guides & Webinars
    • Blog
    • Experiments
    • News
    • Constructor vs Alternatives
    • Documentation
  • About
    • About Us
    • Partners
    • Security & Compliance
    • Careers
© 2025 Constructor All rights reserved
  • Terms of Service
  • Privacy Policy