You may have noticed changes in your “Total times seen in search results” statistics in your Weekly Pet Statistics emails or on your Individual Pet Statistics page in your admin area, especially if you’ve compared the past few weeks to before that. You may have wondered how that could be since you are likely receiving about the same number of inquiries as you have been from your Adopt-a-Pet.com pet listings, and when comparing the same pets, your “Views in Last 7 Days” column numbers in your Weekly Statistics emails are about the same.

Almost all accounts with pets listed have seen a decline in the “Total times seen in search results” number and the related “Hits in Last 7 Days” and “Click-through %” numbers site-wide. We believe this is due to the improvements made to our search results page design and how we count search results page views, as our number of visitors has not dropped.

The improved search design allows users to run a simpler and easier search from the front page of Adoptapet.com. Users then “filter” their search results directly on the results page, using the filters on the left of the page. This means users are able to find pets more quickly and easily — resulting in fewer search results page views. The number of adopters visiting our site and running searches has not significantly decreased, only the expected seasonality dip we see every year at this time, actual pet page views are remaining fairly constant.