Show Visitors What They Searched For — on Every Page

What a visitor types into your search box is the clearest thing they will ever tell you. Most sites answer it once, on the results page, and forget it. The visitor who searched for a parka goes back to the home page and sees the same banner as everyone else.

Personyze keeps each visitor’s last search on their profile. You can target a campaign by it, recommend the products or articles that match it on any page, and see it next to each visit in Live Visits.

The example is our demo shop.

One phrase, kept on the profile

Personyze keeps the last thing each visitor searched for: what they typed into your site’s search, or the keyword a search ad brought them with. With it, it keeps two facts:

• Where it came from — your own site, or a search engine.
• When — which is what “searched in the last 7 days” is measured against.

It is one phrase, not a history: each search replaces the one before it. It stays on the profile across visits when your account can recognize a returning visitor — because you identify visitors, or because you track purchases or conversions. Without either, it holds for the visit it was made in.

Where the phrase comes from

Organic Google results do not pass the phrase, so most search-engine phrases come from search ads. If your search page uses another parameter name, Personyze support sets your account’s own. To check it works, search on your site and open Live Visits: your visit shows the phrase in the Last search column.

Target a campaign by it

In a campaign’s Target step, the behavioral rule Last search has three parts: the phrase (contains, exactly matches, starts with, is empty and more), where it was searched (anywhere, on your site, or in a search engine), and how recently (from the last hour to the last 90 days). Three that work well:

“Contains” is the safe choice: “contains shoes” matches “running shoes” and “shoes for kids”. “Is empty” means the visitor never searched at all.

Recommend what they searched for

Recommendation widgets can run the algorithm Matches Their Search: items that match the visitor’s last search, on the home, category, product or search page.

• Products are matched on your catalog’s own words — title, brand and short description. Relevance decides which items qualify; among equally relevant ones, the visitor’s own signals decide the order.
• Articles are matched on title, topic and description, newest first among equals — so a content site can bring a reader back to what they looked for.
• It shows only to visitors who have searched. The widget is gated automatically, so everyone else sees the page as it was. Add a Last search rule with a time window to limit it to recent searches.

Two limits worth knowing: terms of one or two characters are ignored by the search index, and a phrase that matches nothing shows nothing unless the widget has a fallback. See it beside the other algorithms in the algorithm library.

See it next to every visit

Live Visits has a Last search column — the last thing each visitor searched for on your site — and opening a visit shows it on the visitor’s profile. It is the quickest way to read what people are looking for today, and to spot the searches your site cannot answer.

See your visitors’ searches at workBook a demo and we will show Last search targeting and Matches Their Search running on your own catalog.

Questions people ask