One of most important parts of every store is its Search functionality. Implementing a more advanced search solution can have positive and big impact on search function, which leads to significant increase in conversion rate. After all, visitors trust in search results. If your store’s search experience is good, users will use it more than browsing by clicking through categories.
With artificial intelligence and self learning processes, search engines became even more powerful and provide us with features that were not possible before.
Klevu is one of those search engines – it is fast (really fast), it provides high level of customisation and most important – it learns from your customers and self-improves which results in more accurate search results and increase in revenue.
A few key takeaways from developer’s side:
Responsive works well out of the box, styling is decent and code is something you can work with.
It’s dynamic filters automatically create all relevant filters in the search results.
Error tolerance, as an enhanced keyword search index, ensure that shoppers are always connected to the right products.
Klevu works with both Magento 1 and Magento 2.
(for full feature list, check this link)
Installing Klevu
Installation is pretty much straightforward and same as with other extensions so i won’t talk much about it. After Extension has been installed, you must configure it and create your account.
Go to:
System > Configuration > Klevu > Search configurationand start configuration wizard:
There are some prerequisites to be met, so check them out in case of any issues.
Klevu Dashboard
When you finish with Klevu wizard, you will be provided with credentials to access Klevu Dashboard where you can configure and edit Klevu to suit your needs.
There are many options over there so go through tabs and get yourself familiar with features.
In terms of styling, you will have to edit 2 areas of Klevu search – Search results dropdown and Search results page.
Under Customization section, you can change the look and feel of your Klevu search.
In Search as You Type Layout tab, you can define the look of search dropdown:
You can choose whether you will use Instant faceted search or Instant autocomplete layout– first one displays filters on the left while second one is displaying suggestions and results under.
You can choose between grid or list display, as well as how many products you wish to feature. Pretty much everything you need for start.
Klevu Styling
Under Customize CSS tab, you can edit CSS used for styling of search results dropdown.
You can then save changes and preview the styling on your testing site. Sometimes, Klevu needs few minutes to update changes so be patient. 🙂
If you click on Search results page tab, you will see screenshots and explanation on how to change styling of search results page.
As you can see, it is not possible to change CSS in Klevu Dashboard (like we did for search suggestions), instead we are informed that we can use our own default Magento search results page (in which case we will have our theme styling and no additional CSS modifications will be needed) or we can use Klevu search results page. In that case, styling is done like with any other extension – editing files locally.
Same story as always – copy files from base to your package/theme and start with your magic.
Klevu data
By default, Klevu uses the following attributes in search: name, sku, description, short_description, price and rating.
You can add other custom attributes as well:
As you can see, you can tell Klevu which attribute values will be used in search. Klevu works great with receiving data and sending results back to user but if you want to display some custom product data on search results page, you may be in problem.
Read next…
Klevu Search results page
You can use two types for search results page – Klevu search result page or Magento search results page. Although decision seems pretty much straightforward, there are few differences that you must be aware before making that decision.
If you use:
- Magento search results page
– no need for additional styling (if search results page is already styled)
– no need for additional structural changes
– attributes – multiselect doesn’t work
– ajaxed search results don’t work - Klevu search results page
– instant, fast ajaxed results
– multiselect Attributes
– requires styling
– custom product-related information not shown
Using Klevu search results page may cause an issues with custom data attached on your products. Although you can send additional data to Klevu and Klevu will provide results based on that data, it will not send that data back which means these informations will be missing on frontend. Reason for that is simple – Klevu is not aware of custom data shown on your category listing/search results page. You can define which custom attributes will be included in search but Klevu is not sending that data back, it is only using it to output search results.
That is a problem since that custom data can be really important for users.
Hopefully, there is a solution – Klevu support team. Of course, you can’t modify core functionalities by yourself so you will have to contact these guys. They will then do necessarily changes on their end or you will receive additional code to implement on your site.
I must say that we did this kind of work with klevu support and they did great job. They always react fast and get the job done.
Big question now is – Should we use default Magento search results page template or we should go with Klevu?
Basically, it all depends on project scope.
For heavier projects – it is better to use Magento search results page as in that case you will have your own structure and control over what is shown. On the other side, you will have to do Ajax functionality by yourself, as well as multiselect of attributes in layered navigation.
Using Klevu search results page means you will have to work with Klevu team and if there is a heavy customisation needed, whole process may take a while.
For clean, straightforward project with less custom information, go with Klevu search results page as search speed is just amazing and like i said, results are ajaxed and multiselect works. Results page styling will not follow Theme design so that will be extra work from your side.
Conclusion
Klevu is definitely something you should try/suggest to your clients. For us, it has proven to be one of best search engines we have ever tried.
Klevu is running on several of our projects and clients are satisfied with it.
And the best part – it will only get better since it learns from users and adjusts search results accordingly.
Klevu also offers 14 days of free trial which is enough time for first impressions and looking “under the hood”.
If you wish to know more, go on their site and check out integration guides or other documentation – everything is well written and explained.
We’ve implemented Klevu for our client BAUHAUS Croatia. This home and garden specialists have seen great results after achieving new development milestone, which also included implementation of Klevu search. 74% higher eCommerce Conversion rate, 105% increase in total transactions and 143% jump in Revenue!
If these numbers sound great, let’s see what we can achieve for your store!
