Posted by Chris Chance, Director of IT, Speedway Motors Editor's note: Today’s blog post is from Chris Chance, Director of IT at Speedway Motors, the world’s largest manufacturer, distributor, and retailer of street rod and racing products. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say – and watch the recent Hangout On Air with Speedway Motors and Google Enterprise. For a business that’s based on speed, we had to admit that our Speedway Motors website search was rather slow. That’s not acceptable for a company that’s on the fast track: We fill thousands of orders a week, and our website gets more than 500,000 unique visitors every month. The solution to the speed problem was Google Search Appliance, which fueled faster search for Speedway and also drove big increases in conversions and revenue.
Our previous search product, Mercado’s e-Commerce search and merchandising suite (now Adobe® Search&Promote), didn’t just go slow on delivering results: It took 10 hours a week to manually tune results and build workarounds. But even with all that work, search results took as long as four seconds to appear. We started to realize that our competitors all had better search functionality than we did. Exit Mercado, enter Google Search Appliance.
With more than 60,000 products, many of which have unique names that require inputting for synonyms and alternate keywords, we expected a long implementation. We were wrong – it took just a few weeks. Now that feeds are automatic, we spend only 10 minutes a week checking search results.
Now Speedway Motors really is speedy: Customers typically receive search results in 500 milliseconds, a performance improvement that contributed to a 45% increase in our conversion rate, and a 116% increase in search-attributed revenue. The Google Search Appliance is giving back to our customers and our Ecommerce team – customers are able to quickly find the parts they need and the reduction in search maintenance allows our Ecommerce team to spend more team focusing on what matters – helping our customers build their dream cars.
