When using filters is spooky

Halloween is coming, it is time to get those spooky filters for social media! Great, just don’t make your search filters also spooky at the same time, it would not be a good halloween tradition.

If you are not familiar with search: filters help you to narrow the search results by some criteria. E.g. phones by memory or screen size or food by your eating habits, like gluten-free, bio or vegan. They are quite handy as they help you to see only what you need even if the results page are not personalised. In one of my projects, by adding filters we could increase conversion by 5%, which is quite a formidable increase.

Recently, I have seen a marketing announcement of an eGrocery claiming that lots of filters have been added to the service, so that the users can personalise the results better. Ideally, the pages would already be personalised, but generally it is a good first step. As I like to see myself, what is behind marketing announcements, I have checked the website. It was spooky.

So, first I checked what happens if I select the gluten-free filter in a gluten-free category. Before checking the filter, the category had 146 products. After checking it, the number reduced to 105. As in this category you would expect all products to be gluten-free, we can say that it is around 72% accuracy. Not good, not terrible, but if you use it outside this specific category, you might lose about every 3rd product in your product pages.

The next category I’ve checked was a vegan subcategory. It had 39 results before adding the vegan filter. After adding it only 3 products remained. Yes, 3, which is under 8% of accuracy, which is definitely well below the good range.

So, while generally adding filters to search is good, it is true only if the data behind your filters is good enough. If it is not the case, you might want to fix it before releasing something making it visible immediately, otherwise you might ruin customer trust.

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Struggling with data? Let’s have a free chat how we might fix it. Drop an email to aron.negyesi@gmail.com