Why Use Personalization In Site Search?
Offering a personalized site search ensures that all shoppers have a tailored and optimal site experience, whether they are high intent shoppers or just browsers.
Updated June 16, 2025.
Ecommerce site search is the backbone of any successful eCommerce brand. The benefits of having a site search are huge for high intent shoppers, and for having an overall improved customer experience. But having site search alone doesn’t cut it. Including personalization within site search boosts the experience to the next level.
Why Use Personalized Site Search?
Offering personalization in site search is well worth the time and effort. Including personalization drives revenue and lets shoppers know that their personal journey with your store is valued. Personalizing results means that users are able to find the products that apply to them easily.
This means that there is higher customer engagement, as shoppers are actually seeing the products they want, as opposed to a random selection. The result of all of this customer personalization means that your business will see higher revenues.
If shoppers are seeing relevant products to them, they are more likely to buy them, and have a more positive impression of your brand. This is a win-win for both business and shopper.
How To Include Personalization In Search
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Semantic Search First
One of the most important ways of ensuring that your search offers a personalized solution is through making sure your search operates semantically. This means rather than offering a search which is keyword based, your search operates on user intent.
Natural Language Processing
Semantic search combines machine learning and natural language processing to create accurate results based on user intent. Shoppers can search in the way that they speak; the natural language to them.
This means that they are relaxed whilst searching, and don’t need to include specific terms and keywords to find results. This can be difficult if shoppers aren’t experts in certain areas, and they might not know the right terms.
Vector & Multimodal Search
Vector search is another great example of semantic search which uses vectors to understand user intent and produce results based on this. Vector search is also great as shoppers can search using multimodal search, personalizing their search efforts to ways that suit them most.
Some shoppers might not know what the item they are looking for is called, but they might have a picture. Being able to offer this level of personalization in terms of searching means that shoppers can feel confident they will always find a result. This means your store is much more likely to make the sale.
Use Search Data
Reviewing users’ search query and past search history can give you a good understanding of what shoppers are looking for. If a shopper always searches for oat milk, for example, you can perhaps prioritize non dairy milks for them. This will help their experience run smoother and show them you care.
On a more general level, if you see that top searches within the ‘dress’ category for women are always ‘cocktail dresses’, you can push these closer to the top and see the effect it has on sales. Making little tweaks like this, on an individual and wider level, can make all the difference.
Personalized Filters
If a shopper is a regular on your site, they don’t want to have to click the same filters every single time. If they always select certain things such as:
Size
Gender
Color
Model
You can simply save these for this customer when they come online, and have them ready to go. This means that shoppers don’t have to waste time, and are quicker to make the sale.
A/B Test
As with anything in eCommerce, once you start to implement a new solution, it requires testing. You can’t just expect everything to work without any hiccups, especially personalization. For this reason, once you start experimenting with new personalization techniques, run some A/B tests.
This will show you how your personalization strategy is doing. Hopefully it’s going well, but if the tests prove different, there’s always time to tweak and adjust.
Conclusion
Personalization in site search can make all the difference to how customers feel valued, and operate on your site. You want to make sure that customers are achieving a top quality experience, and that your business is benefiting from this.
