Filtering

Many people in the online industry confuse "filtering" and "sorting". In short, sorting contains all the products, but changes the order. For example, it can sort it by color, price, popularity, etc. Filtering, on the other hand, hides some of the products. For example, you can filter the products so that you only see the green products or only see products under 500,-. This is the difference between filtering and sorting.

Filters are usually made as checkboxes on a webshop. Sometimes you also see a slider where you can filter the products. This is typically used when it comes to filtering by price.

Pitfalls when filtering

The biggest pitfall of filtering is the risk of duplicate content. However, this is a pitfall that most shop systems have mastered, but you should be aware of it. It occurs when filtering is done with parameters in the URL. For example, you may have a URL called dinwebshop.dk/alle-produkter and then you get a new URL called dinwebshop.dk/alle-produkter?filter=colour&show=green. Now you have new content in the form of products, but the title, description, headline and texts are the same. Google will think "this is almost identical to yourwebshop.dk/alle-produkter" and thus you risk being hit by duplicate content and being penalized. There are two solutions if your filtering is done this way:

• You can choose to noindex all URLs with the filtering parameters
• You can canonical tag all URLs with the filtering parameters

This way you can have your filtering with parameters in the URL and not be penalized by Google.

The other pitfall of filtering is getting it to work optimally, so the solution is a bit more fluffy.

First of all, remember to test your filtering on your mobile phone. It's a difficult task to both get the filtering to work and show which filters are selected while also showing the selected products. So make sure to user test your category pages on mobile phones and see how users apply your filters.

Improving your filters

Filters can easily be improved. You may want users to be able to filter on 18 different colors, but in reality they may only filter on four colors (or none at all). If a filter is not used by your users, you should remove it.

That's why it's important that you have tracking on your filters so you can follow how your users use your filters. A pitfall here can be that you only show a selection of filters to people on mobile. For example, if you have size and brand filters but only show the size filter to users on mobile devices, it may appear that the size filter is used much more often than the brand filter when you look at your Google Analytics. Therefore, make sure to segment users by device when looking at filter usage.

Improving your online shop with filters

As mentioned above, tracking your filters is important. For example, if you have a children's clothing webshop where you have focused on children aged 0-3 years, you will also tend to shop according to this and have the most clothes in that age group. However, if your real-life users have children of all ages and sort mostly by, for example, "over 10 years", then you can experiment with finding more clothes in the over 10 years age group.

Similarly, you can get something out of looking at what price range and possibly what product categories the user filters the search results by. Presumably, these are the items that your users are interested in.

Tracking of filters

We recommend that you use Google Analytics event tracking to track how your users use the filters.

Here you can see how it looks in Analytics.

You can then read the numbers under the menu item Behavior in Google Analytics.

We know online marketing in Shoporama

We've been working with online marketing ourselves for decades. As the only shop system in the country, we have spoken multiple times at conferences such as Marketingcamp, SEOday, Shopcamp, Digital Marketing, E-commerce Manager, Ecommerce Day, Web Analytics Wednesday and many more.