How to find out what your customers actually want to buy
This week one of our clients called me. He runs an ecommerce store that sells houseplants. He brought up a familiar problem: “I don’t know which products my customers are really interested in, or which bundles I should put together.”
My answer was simple: “Let’s look at what people searched for on your site.”
He didn’t understand what I meant. He had no idea you could see that.
In 2 minutes I built him a report in Google Analytics that shows exactly which words visitors typed into the site’s internal search bar.
And what did we find?
86 searches in the last 28 days.
He was completely stunned.
Every one of those searches is a customer telling him exactly what they want to buy. He just didn’t know it.
Step-by-step guide: how to see the searches on your site
Here are the simple steps to access this data:
Go to Google Analytics 4
Blank ←Explore
Add “Search term” under Dimensions
Add “Event count” under Metrics
That’s it. Now you have accurate data on what your customers are actually looking for.
The results that surprised all of us
These were the client’s top searches:
- “צמחים למטבח“ (kitchen plants): 41 searches (and he had no page for it!)
- “צמחים שלא צריכים שמש“ (plants that don’t need sun): 26 searches (a category that doesn’t exist on the site)
- “פוטוס גולדן“ (golden pothos): 13 searches (he carries other pothos varieties, but not golden)
- “יין“ (wine): 6 searches (a great idea for gift sets!)
Why this changes everything
Every search in this data is really:
- An idea for a new page on the site
- A topic for a blog post
- A product missing from inventory
- A ready-made keyword for campaigns
At DigiAssets we see this again and again: your customers are already giving you the best keywords in the world. The only problem is that you don’t know where to look for them.
What do you do with this data?
Our client figured out what to do very quickly:
- Created a new “Kitchen Plants” page
- Set up a “Plants for Dark Rooms” category
- Ordered golden pothos for inventory
- Started planning gift sets with wine
The question we’re curious about
How many of you know what people searched for on your site this week?
If the answer is “I don’t know,” it’s time to change that.
