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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
A website is one of the most important engagement and conversion tools a company has, and marketers are constantly looking for ways to improve site performance.
As websites have evolved, what has become increasingly clear is that building a high-performance one is both an art and a science, requiring skills across a variety of design, content, user experience, and analytics disciplines.
From SEO to typography, many factors contribute to a website’s ultimate success.
Unfortunately, however, recent research indicates that many companies have neglected to focus on the one feature of their websites that has the potential to improve performance most dramatically: Search. Indeed, a report by the analyst firm Forrester Research noted that
“Search on many corporate websites is an understaffed,
IT-funded afterthought.” 1
This inattention has understandably had a negative effect on visitor satisfaction. A recent report conducted by APSU and IBM analyzed customer comments directed at the top
100 e-commerce websites in the United States and United
Kingdom, 2 and revealed that the single biggest reason for visitor dissatisfaction—representing approximately 25% of all negative customer comments logged—were the sites’ poor search capabilities. (Alternatively, only 0.1% were expressions of dissatisfaction with the websites’ navigation.)
The number of negative tweets related to customers’ online experiences for the Top 100 UK and US e-commerce websites.
% of total tweets January 1 - December 4, 2013
Increase since last year
US - 61%
Account
Checkout
Error
Form
Navigation
Ordering
0.1
0.1
0.7
4.9
2.0
3.8
5.1
5.6
6.9
7.7
10.5
13.5
Payment
Searching
Security
Speed
Stock
Website
6.4
7.0
3.9
5.1
2.6
2.7
4.8
6.8
Source: APSU, 2013 2
UK - 53%
18.6
26.2
25.0
30.0
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
And this discontent is not limited strictly to e-commerce shoppers. A recent survey by Forrester Research revealed that individuals who engage in online banking rated secure website search as “above average” in importance, yet “below average” in quality. (Unfortunately, the same survey revealed that less than one-third of the
25 largest North American banks currently even offer search on their websites.
3 )
So we know that visitors are eager for a better search experience. And we know that search directly impacts the key website performance metrics most companies
care about. Sites that provide visitors with intuitive and contextual search capabilities see dramatically better visitor engagement, including longer average time-onsite, more repeat visitors, increased page views per visitor, and most importantly, more conversions.
But in order to realize these improvements, marketing teams must own and manage their company’s website
search experience. Only marketers understand the customer and the market landscape well enough to ensure search is performing the way it needs to. It is just too important to be relegated to IT staff any longer.
So let’s explore how marketers can be empowered to take ownership of their company’s website search. To do this, first let’s explore what makes great search so great.
Time on Site
# of Visitors
▲ 67%
▲ 20%
# of Repeat Visitors ▲ 60%
# of Searches Performed ▲ 300%
# of Page Views ▲ 33%
Conversions ▲ 30%
*Results gathered directly by Coveo from a variety of Fortune 500, not-for-profit, and small/mid-market e-commerce organizations.
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
At its heart, successful website search connects visitors with the information, products, and people they need, when they need it, in order to help them meet their goals.
To make these connections possible, search must deliver on four fronts:
First and foremost, successful website search delivers content that is relevant to the visitor, at the time and in the manner most helpful. We’ll use the term content here as a catch-all phrase to describe a wide variety of things that a visitor might want to explore and connect with on the website, whether that is specific information, a particular product, or an individual or group.
During the winter months a visitor on a travel website might find an offer for a Caribbean cruise very
EXAMPLE relevant to her search for “budget vacations.”
But if she ran a similar search on the same site during the summer months, the same special offer would likely prove irrelevant to her.
And what about this term, relevant? Relevance is, by definition, quite a personal measure. What is relevant to one visitor or group might not be relevant to another, and what one visitor finds relevant today might prove irrelevant to her later on.
In short, what is relevant to a visitor is a constantly moving target that depends upon an ever-evolving mix of individual preference, timing, seasonality, the availability of competitive products, and other personal and market forces.
A successful site search solution, then, does four things to ensure it is always providing relevant content to its visitors:
First, it analyzes and identifies relevant content from across all of a company’s available systems and sources, including product catalogs, collaboration and messaging platforms, company databases, social channels, other websites, and more. Wherever relevant content resides, a successful solution securely integrates and surfaces it to the visitor.
Even more, successful search will leverage any and all available information to understand the unique context and history of the visitor. This might include basic information readily available about all visitors (IP address, geo-location, the type of device or browser used, and the internet search term the visitor used to find the website, for example), or it might include very specific information about a visitor, such as her purchase history, the nature and status of her account with the company, or prior site
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
Relevant content & products might reside in other enterprise systems, or on other social channels and internet sites
WCM Messaging ERP File Share CRM Product
Catalog
External Sites
& Libraries activity. Often much of this type of information is captured via browser-based cookies deployed by the website, but often this information resides within the company’s various enterprise systems, such as a CRM, a proprietary database, or a marketing automation solution. Wherever it resides, the search solution must be able to readily utilize these contextual clues to surface content that is most likely relevant.
An exceptional search solution also provides marketers with control over the precise relevance of different content for different visitors. Because so many dynamic and constantly moving forces are at work determining whether a piece of content is relevant for a particular visitor, relevance clues must be easily managed on multiple dimensions simultaneously. This demands comprehensive, actionable, and easy-to-understand reporting that measures both search performance and shows how it is impacting the website’s broader KPIs.
Dashboards visualizing these metrics enable marketers to quickly spot and adjust relevance rules to ensure visitors are connecting with the right content at the right time.
ƒ Deliver relevant content from all systems
ƒ Leverage contextual clues from all available sources
ƒ Deliver actionable performance reporting
ƒ Provide easy-to-use relevance tuning tools
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
Delivering relevant results to visitors is critical, but it is only the beginning. To help people connect with the content they desire in the quickest, most intuitive way possible, websites need to provide tools for the visitor to sort, filter, explore, and navigate their search results with ease. A user-friendly interface, conversational in nature, where results can be filtered by a variety of logical values
(by product, manufacturer, document, author, price, or theme for example) helps visitors hone in on the precise information or product they want quickly. This capability— often referred to as faceting—is especially useful for e-commerce and content rich sites such as the American
Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) and The Brookings
Institution’s websites.
To enhance the user experience, facets can be represented graphically using charts, icons, histograms, slider bars, and other visualizations appropriate for the content. A successful search solution should provide marketers a broad range of easy-to-deploy options for visualizing facets in a manner most suitable to the specific content, while empowering visitors to forge their own, personal path of discovery.
And importantly, just like the relevance of the search results themselves, the tools visitors are provided to filter, rank, and explore their search results must be constantly tuned in response to changing visitor preferences, shifts in the competitive landscape, and other market forces.
This means that just as marketers must have precision control over the relevance of the search results, so too must they have the ability to easily adjust how visitors are able to filter, facet, compare, and assess their results.
Facets can be represented graphically with elements such as slider bars and bar charts, to empower visitors to easily filter their results.
ƒ Enable easy filtering, ranking, and previewing
ƒ Offer flexible visual filtering options
ƒ Provide easy-to-use tools to build facets and filters
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
A recent survey by Walker Sands indicates that nearly
30% of all website traffic takes place over mobile devices.
4 As Forrester Research recently noted in a
2014 report, “Mobile moments are now the frontline of customer experience.” 5
Organizations are architecting their websites with this in mind, and Responsive Design—an approach aimed at building websites to provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices—is fast becoming the new standard.
When it comes to succeeding on the increasingly
“mobile” web, the importance and value of highperformance, responsive site search is even greater, since search is unique in its ability to overcome the navigational challenges and other limitations posed by smaller screen sizes and touch interfaces. On the mobile web, search forges the shortest and easiest path between visitors and the content they need and want.
ƒ Support Responsive Design
ƒ Provide mobile testing & preview capabilities
The website of IGA Supermarkets provides visitors with intuitive mobile search and results filtering capabilities.
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
Finally, successful website search promotes discovery and engagement by automatically suggesting relevant content to the visitor. Earlier we noted that successful search solutions deliver relevant results based upon not only the visitor’s particular query, but also by leveraging contextual clues such as IP address and purchase history.
In today’s dynamic marketplace, however, sites should not wait until the visitor performs a query in order to start suggesting exceptional, personalized content.
For example, using the same contextual clues we discussed earlier, a successful search solution will “auto- complete” queries for the visitor as she begins typing.
Auto-completing predicts what the visitor might want to search for, and suggests queries to facilitate the process.
Powerful and intuitive auto-complete not only suggests queries, but organizes and displays those suggestions in a way that helps the visitor more quickly find what they are looking for, and discover new content.
But beyond merely suggesting queries, a great search solution will suggest relevant content and products. This type of capability is often referred to as a search-driven content page, and it is having a profound impact on how modern websites are architected and managed.
Auto-completing the visitor’s query helps them find and discover new content
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
During the month of February, a travel site might wish to display on its home page all of the flights available to tropical destinations priced under $300. Because the inventory of available flights is constantly changing, manually updating this page each day would prove quite
EXAMPLE burdensome. A search-driven content page would— the moment a visitor hits the home page—send an automated query to the company’s flight inventory catalog, and display only those flights in stock. Using additional contextual clues
(the IP address or prior purchase history of the visitor, for example) the page could further personalize the content automatically displayed; offering visitors residing in Canada flights to Cuba, while offering flights to the
Caribbean for visitors residing in the U.S.
To the website visitor, a search-driven content page looks and behaves just like any other HTML web page. However what the visitor may not realize is that all of the content displayed on the page (whether it be a list of product offerings, a series of news announcements, a feed of social posts, etc.) are the result of an automated set of queries being performed the moment the visitor hits the page, all informed by available contextual relevance clues.
The benefit of such pages is that they effectively transform a visitor’s context into an automated, personalized query , resulting in website content that is always relevant, up-to-date, and personalized to the visitor…all while reducing the burden on marketers of manually updating the page itself.
Now that we have a good understanding of what makes great site search great, let’s talk again about why marketers need to own it.
ƒ Leverage contextual clues from all available sources
ƒ Provide rich auto-complete capabilities
ƒ Enable search-driven content pages
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
There are four big reasons the marketing team should own website search. Typically, a company’s marketing team is:
ƒ The most deeply invested in the site’s overall success
ƒ The most knowledgeable about the customer and their evolving tastes
ƒ The most aware of changing market conditions and the competitive landscape
ƒ The most attuned to their company’s messaging, products and promotions
Put another way: The marketing team really cares if the website is working well, and has the market knowledge needed to keep site search performing well, in a way that is efficient and relevant to visitors.
adequately manage website search, much less perform the type of A/B testing necessary to keep it optimized.
And even if a technical staff member did have the required understanding (or worked closely with someone from the marketing department who did), because the available tools demanded so much manual programming and configuration, the ongoing fine-tuning and testing necessary to keep up with changing customer preferences proved effectively impossible.
But can a marketing team actually own something like site search? Isn’t this an area that IT departments have historically managed?
Fortunately the technologies underlying website search have evolved in recent years, and vendors have focused on improving usability. What was once a complex and highly technical task (building and managing exceptional site search experiences) can now be one completely owned by non-technical, marketing team members… where it belongs.
Until recently, the tools available to build and manage a website’s search capabilities have been so complex that only dedicated technical staff with adequate programming skills could wield them. And unfortunately, most technical staff do not have the time (or the charter) to understand the customer and the market landscape well enough to
To understand what to look for in a site search solution, let’s return to the four pillars of success we identified earlier, and map the specific features each require in order to truly empower a marketing team with ownership of the solution.
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
To deliver Relevant & Contextual Search Results , a solution owned by marketers should:
ƒ Enable the code-free, ‘drag and drop’ build-out of full-featured search pages
ƒ Provide an interface to easily fine-tune relevance rules, without scripting or programming
ƒ Securely integrate content residing beyond the website, both from within and outside the organization
ƒ Deliver actionable analytics and easy-to-manage testing capabilities so marketers can understand how well search is working, and make precision adjustments accordingly
To ensure Intuitive Filtering & Ranking for visitors, a solution owned by marketers should:
ƒ Allow for the fast, code-free configuration of options for visitors to filter, order, sort, and preview their search results
ƒ Provide a variety of options and templates for visualizing facets, content types, and other elements of the search interface
To provide a Seamless Access & Experience across devices, a solution owned by marketers should:
ƒ Fully support responsive design, so the site’s search experience is consistent for all visitors
ƒ Provide comprehensive testing & preview capabilities, so marketers can optimize the visitor’s experience across different devices.
To deliver the Predictive Intelligence that makes a visitor’s experience more personal and engaging, a solution owned by marketers should:
ƒ Be able to utilize contextual clues about the visitor from any variety of sources (including the WCM itself, other enterprise systems, and other websites) to automatically auto-complete queries and dynamically populate search-driven content pages
Only a solution with this breadth of features can truly empower the marketing team to assume ownership.
Because site search, however, is always just one component of a company’s broader website solution
(critically important though it is), finding a WCM platform that provides this kind of advanced search functionality
(and usability) as part of its broader offering has its advantages. Unfortunately none of the leading WCM solutions on the market today provide both the advanced search functionality and ease-of-use necessary to enable marketers to truly own the search experience.
Fortunately, solutions like Coveo for Sitecore have been developed, which offer a complete site search solution fully integrated with Sitecore’s best-in-class WCM and digital marketing platforms, known collectively as
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
Sitecore CEP . Coveo for Sitecore makes it possible for marketers to build and manage the types of advanced and personalized search experiences we’ve discussed throughout this brief, all from directly within their Sitecore console, and using the same Sitecore tools and analytics used to manage the rest of the site.
We hope this brief has helped highlight the critical role search plays in a website’s ultimate success, and has provided some insights and guidance that might prove useful when your company next evaluates WCM and site search solutions.
1 Forrester Research, “Site Search Evolves From Technical Feature to Customer
Touchpoint,” Leslie Owens, 2011
2 APSU, “Customer’s Online Shopping Frustrations” Infographic, 2013
3 Forrester Research, “Why More Banks Should Put Search On Their Secure Websites,” Peter Wannemacher, 2013
4 Walker Sands, “Walker Sands Mobile Traffic Report Q3 2013,” 2013
5 Forrester Research, “Mobile Moments Transform Customer Experience,” Josh
Bernoff, Julie A. Ask, Ted Schadler, and Ron Rogowski, 2014
Intuitive management tools like Coveo for Sitecore’s integrated rules builder empower marketers to own the site search experience.
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Website Search Is Business-Critical , and Marketers Should Own It
Coveo makes companies and websites more relevant and responsive, by providing technology that delivers in real time the most relevant, context-aware information for every employee, every customer and every website visitor.
Coveo’s transformational technology has been recognized as the most complete, end-to-end search & relevance platform available today. Coveo takes search to a new, more relevant level by securely connecting with and harnessing an organization’s big, fragmented data from any combination of cloud, social, and on-premise systems. The Coveo Advanced Relevance Engine injects the most relevant knowledge into the context of every user, focusing on three business areas to:
ƒ Radically boost knowledge management initiatives by making an organization’s collective knowledge easily accessible & relevant, so that all employees can take the best actions;
ƒ Inject more relevant knowledge into customer service and sales interactions; and
ƒ Personalize online customer experiences within high-end websites and communities.
Coveo is a strategic partner of several leading software companies such as Salesforce.com and Sitecore, and has been recognized as a visionary by Gartner in its  Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Search . Among
Coveo customers are leading organizations such as
Lockheed Martin, Rally Software, and SunGard. For more information, visit  www.coveo.com
, follow us on the Coveo blog ,  LinkedIn , Twitter  and YouTube .
www.coveo.com
info@coveo.com
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+1.800.635.5476
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+1.418.263.1111
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+31 (0)20 658 6334
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