searchHub Customer: Fritz Berger GmbH — Ecommerce Site Search Optimization
SUCCESS STORY
Fritz Berger: 3,500 keywords per product. One purchase intent. Zero manual rules.
How a camping retailer routed 3,500 keyword variants through a single purchase intent cluster, automated the long-tail, and lifted conversion rate by 67%. No search engine swap. No extra headcount.
Conversion Rate
+67%
Click Rate
+153%
Umsatz via Search
+136%
The Customer
Fritz Berger is one of the largest camping specialists in the German-speaking market. Over 100 stores, nearly 800 employees, a product range spanning tent pegs to camping stoves to outdoor apparel. In-store and online, for beginners and die-hard campers. Family-owned for 68 years, now expanding internationally.
What makes Fritz Berger a special case online: every product category brings its own jargon, dialects, and spelling chaos. Customers search for the same item using hundreds of different terms. The product depth that makes Fritz Berger strong in brick-and-mortar became an Achilles’ heel in ecommerce.
Years
68
Stores across Europe
100+
Employees
~800
Expansion
int’l
The Challenge: When Manual Optimization Hits a Wall
Fritz Berger has been running a solid search technology since 2022. Smart ranking, flexible merchandising, well-structured data enrichment. The top 1,000 search terms performed well.
The problem was deeper. It lived in the long-tail.
Our customers search for products with many different terms — up to 3,500 different terms for a single product. No human can optimize all those combinations.
Hundreds of spelling variants per product group. Terms searched once or twice and never again. Zero-results pages that frustrated customers and even prevented store staff from finding products in the system.
Sonja spent her days on manual synonym maintenance instead of strategic category work. New products couldn’t be search-optimized fast enough. And the planned international expansion threatened to multiply the same problem in every new language.
For Christoph Kirner, Head of E-Commerce at Fritz Berger, the conclusion was clear: more manual micro-improvements were not the answer. The team needed a tool that understood the long-tail on its own, without replacing the existing search engine.
The Solution: searchHub as an Optimization Layer for the Existing Search
searchHub doesn’t replace search technology. It sits in front of it — between the customer and the search engine. An optimization layer that fixes what reaches your search, not the search itself.
Purchase Intent Clustering
“Tent carpet”, “outdoor rug”, “awning mat”, and 497 other variants — all the same purchase intent. searchHub groups them into a single cluster, based on which keywords actually led to clicks and purchases.
Keyword Ambassador
From each cluster, searchHub picks the statistically highest-performing keyword as the “ambassador.” Only that optimized term gets sent to the search engine. Fewer queries, better results.
Continuous Learning
New spelling variants are detected and assigned to existing clusters without manual intervention. The system learns from real customer behavior, continuously.
Suggest As You Type
Autocomplete becomes intent prediction. Customers see statistically relevant suggestions while typing — ranked by actual purchase probability, not alphabetical order.
The existing search technology keeps its strengths: ranking, merchandising, data enrichment. searchHub adds what was missing — automated language understanding for the long-tail.
This isn't a weakness of the existing search technology. The search terms for a single product are simply too varied. It's a fundamental challenge: no human can manually maintain hundreds of spelling variants.
The Results: Numbers That Don't Need a Sales Pitch
Integration took a few weeks. A/B test started August 2024. Full rollout on October 15th. The results beat every expectation:
Conversion Rate
+67%
Click Rate
+153%
Search-Driven Revenue
+136%
BEFORE
Manually maintaining 500 variants of a single search term
AFTER
Optimizing that same term in three clicks
Fewer zero-results pages
Faster path to purchase
Fewer repeat searches
Store staff can finally find products too
Even if I manually optimized 20% of the terms, I'd never match what searchHub delivers on its own.
Outlook: Scaling Without the Pain
Fritz Berger is expanding internationally. Before searchHub, that would have meant one thing: the same search problem, multiplied by every new language. Today, it’s a different story.
The international expansion continues. Managers in other countries can operate both systems easily. The search technology for marketing optimizations; searchHub runs on its own in the background.
The integration is built to be reused. What works once, works everywhere. searchHub isn’t a project. It’s infrastructure.
If your customers search for the same product with hundreds of different terms, and your search team spends more time maintaining synonyms than doing strategic work — that’s the problem searchHub was built to solve.
Search is no longer a pain point. I can finally use my camping expertise strategically, so the company can better reach its goals.
Download the Full Fritz Berger Success Story
The complete case study with project timeline, technical integration details, and all KPIs — as a PDF.
searchHub Products in Use
smartQuery
Optimizes any onsite search by grouping long-tail keywords into purchase intent clusters. Only the keywords with the strongest match to customer intent reach the search engine. Search managers keep full control.
smartSuggest
Turns autocomplete into real intent prediction. Based on conversion data, it shows customers proven search terms — often before they start typing. Ranked by actual performance, not alphabetical order.
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