Promoted Search Results for Onsite Search
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By creating promoted search results for your website's onsite search, you can help users find your content, engage with your site more, increase dwell time, page consumption, and much more. Presented at Pubcon 2016 in Las Vegas by Linda Caplinger, Global Search Lead for NVIDIA Corporation of Santa Clara, California.
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Promoted Search Results for Onsite Search
- 1. Linda Caplinger Global Search Lead @ NVIDIA Corporation PROMOTED SEARCH RESULTS FOR ONSITE SEARCH #pubcon @lindacaplinger
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- 4. 4 INTERNAL SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION: iSEO “The process of optimizing your site’s internal search results to help users find information via a query as fast as possible AND to take them to the most relevant (or highly converting) results.” #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 5. 5 WHY FOCUS ON INTERNAL SEO? Up to 30 to 45% of visitors will use search Many users just start with search Users that use your site search convert higher: 1.8X Site issues
- 6. 6 POTENTIAL PROBLEMS WITH THE SITE • Issues with Main or Global Navigation • Confusing UX, IA, or Organization of Content (“Friction”) • Company language <> Customer Language • Dead End (or “Cul de Sac”) Landing Pages • General Impatience with Speed of Finding Information on Your Site Multiple Domains – User Doesn’t Know Where to Find Content (SYM Issue) #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 7. 7 3 AREAS OF FOCUS FOR ISEO: 1. Site Content: • What can the internal engine or crawler find and display? 2. Refining Results: • What can the user do with the results? 3. Overall Design & UX • Where is the search box? • How does the user decide where to click? #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 8. 8 LEVERAGE EXISTING SEM SKILLS: Optimizing for Internal SEO harnesses: 1. Paid Search Skills 2. SEO skills 3. Awareness of User Intent 4. Analytics 5. Data Cleaning #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 9. 9 WHAT’S DIFFERENT HERE? #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 10. 10 PROMOTE WHAT’S MOST IMPORTANT Promoted Search Results are search results that show up on TOP of your site’s internal search results #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 11. 11 WHY BUILD PROMOTED RESULTS? 25% of your visitors will CLICK on promoted results!! Control search results placement & “look – feel” on your site Bubble up most relevant results Direct users to eCommerce or other domains Drop into sales funnel FASTER > higher conversions Results are trackable & scalable Increase time on site; page consumption make for happier site visitors #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 12. 12 ADDED BENEFIT FOR YOU? IMMEDIATE GRATIFICATION + IMMEDIATE CONVERSIONS #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 13. 13 7 STEPS TO OPTIMIZING PROMOTED SEARCH RESULTS 1. Get ahold of internal search query data (keywords + instances) 2. Scrub your data (stop words, characters) 3. Cluster or categorize “like” terms 4. 80:20 Rule: terms that cover the most queries 5. Write targeted ad copy (“paid search” skill) 6. Identify most relevant URLs 7. Add conversion tracking #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 14. 14 1. GATHER QUERIES & VOLUMES Get Your Raw Data: Google Analytics (search queries) Weblogs Export your query data as: Full query string, Instances (of the query) Span of time for collection? More = irons out variations, seasonality (1 year) • Less = campaigns, holidays, events #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 15. 15 2. SCRUB YOUR DATA If your internal search engine ignores them, remove: Stop Words Characters: `-=[];’,./~!@#%^&*()_+{}|:”<>? $ is usually NOT one to remove Convert everything to lowercase Sort a > z Dedupe: excel or use a macro #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 16. 16 3. CLUSTER LIKE TERMS #pubcon @lindacaplinger Lots of very close queries where you can tell user INTENT is the same
- 17. 17 3. CLUSTER LIKE TERMS Creating a single promoted result for each query is time intensive Use your Paid Search skills here. Think: “broad match” Find queries that contain a similar keyword to hone in on: Deep Learning Deep Learning graphics card Deep Learning supercomputer Deep Learning hardware Write once, use multiple times. #pubcon @lindacaplinger Cluster these into “Deep Learning” category
- 18. 18 4. KNOW YOUR HIGH VALUE QUERIES Determine: what construes a conversion to you? Downloads (e.g., driver, whitepaper, SDK, trial software) Lead gen forms Watch video Or focus on high value products or AOV Consider marketing to: Differing parts of the funnel (“fastest”, “compare”, “buy”, “support”) Personas #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 19. 19 80:20 RULE #pubcon @lindacaplinger Raw Internal Search Query Data Cleaned Search Queries Promoted Search Results Continue to Refine What’s Left First project: Projected sales of $1.2- 1.4MM in Year 1 Figuring out what’s left is the hard part – we used Access + VB 50,000 Queries Focus on Top 200 Terms Covered about 24K Queries
- 20. 20 5. WRITE TARGETED AD COPY Just like Adwords: Incorporate keyword Query in: title, description Ugly URL? Use a vanity or shortener If your URL doesn’t include the keyword, you can use a shortener and get same effect. Include CTA Images help CTR #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 21. 21 6. RELEVANT URLS Think: Adwords Quality Score Alignment between: Keyword > Ad Copy > Landing Page Are you taking the user to the most relevant landing page? If you’re showing more than 1 promoted result, are they different enough to keep from confusing the user? I nearly always prefer to display the destination URL. #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 22. 22 CHALLENGE: MULTIPLE STAKEHOLDERS AND DIFFERENT URLS #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 23. 23 7. TRACKING CONVERSIONS Prove value Add conversion tracking to your promoted result URLs Digital River: CID tag Amazon: use your affiliate ID Google Analytics: tag pages for GA and conversion script on confirmation page #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 25. 25 WHAT TO DO WITH ZERO RESULTS PAGES? #pubcon @lindacaplinger Zero Results Pages are MISSED OPPORTUNITIES!
- 26. 26 ANOTHER UNUSEFUL ZERO SEARCH RESULTS PAGE #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 27. 27 USEFUL EMPTY SEARCH RESULTS PAGES #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 28. 28 INTERNAL SEARCH ANALYTICS #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 29. 29 GOOGLE CUSTOM SEARCH (CSE) #pubcon @lindacaplinger You can view meager data in this view – best to integrate Google Analytics and view more in depth insights there.
- 30. 30 GOOGLE ANALYTICS (FOR GCS) #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 31. 31 GOOGLE ANALYTICS #pubcon @lindacaplinger Results page views # exits # refinem ents Post search dwell time depth What happened AFTER the user did a query?
- 32. 32 SUCCESS CRITERIA Reduced bounce rates after search results page Lower repeat queries as evidenced by path analysis (user selects a search result on page 1 and no subsequent search occurs) Query 1 > Landing Page > Query 2 > Landing Page 2 > Query 3 (etc…) Query 1 > Landing Page > Conversion (better!) Increased clicks and conversions from internal search Increased time on site AFTER doing a search Reduction in visits that END on a search results page Increase in average page depth > Increase in engagement? #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 33. 33 ONGOING MAINTENANCE: Test variations on ad copy, images, and landing pages to find highest converting Periodically compare your promoted KeyMatch terms to your search logs to find new opportunities for promoted results Revisit top 200-300 queries – ensure tight results - 80/20 rule! Look for ZERO results queries > customize your empty search results page (sitemap, include query, offer similar content, etc). Use a script to compare your site search terms vs. your promotions to see what’s left unaddressed. #pubcon @lindacaplinger LATHER > RINSE > REPEAT
- 34. 34 KEY TAKEWAYS 1. Clean your query data of stop words and characters. 2. Use your SEM skills to create compelling, highly converting ad copy 3. 80:20 rule! Focus on the top 200-300 queries, then expand. 4. Tracking parameters – prove value. 5. Seek out & address zero search results queries. #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 37. 37 WHAT TERMS ARE LACKING PROMOTED RESULTS? Compare the terms you have created promoted results for against ALL queries done on site I do this with Access (Visual Basic script) Remember: some queries cover multiple permutations: Promoted query: “antivirus” Promoted result may show for: free antivirus, antivirus definitions, enterprise antivirus May NOT show for: “anti virus” (space makes it unique) Ask: Is this result EXPECTED or NORMAL for this query? You need to start by cleaning your data.
- 38. 38 CLEANING YOUR INTERNAL SEARCH QUERY DATA Normalize by doing the following: Lowercase Remove repetitive spaces Remove stop words & ignored characters Sort A > Z Remove Duplications Repeat as Required
- 39. 39 ADDED VALUE FOR INTERNAL SEARCH Auto-compete suggestions Images for Autocomplete &/or iSERPs Image search results page Meta data for pivoting / filtering results: By Product By Year By Document Type (HTML, PDF, Video) #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 40. 40 2 SITES – NO CONNECTORS #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 41. 41 PIVOTING OR FILTERING SAP results let user pivot on: Content Type: HTML PDF Audio / Visual Press Release Industry or BU Line of Business (LOB) Customer’s Company Size: Small business Medium business Enterprise #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 42. 42 PIVOTING OR FILTERING Time intensive to add lots of meta data Google can do “entity recognition” Other pivot points: Year of Publication Language #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 43. 43 QUICK LINKS Uses? Bubble up most popular site sections Most popular query categories Replicate footer content #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 44. 44 CROSS DOMAIN APPLICATION #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 45. 45 GOOGLE RESOURCES Google Search Appliance (GSA): http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/support/ Google Custom Search Engine (CSE): https://www.google.com/cse/ Google Site Search: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/gss.html GSA vs. Site Search: http://www.google.com/enterprise/search/products/ #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 46. 46 DATA CLEANING Older version of excel to remove dups: http://support2.microsoft.com/kb/213355 Email me for a copy of LindaWork1.mdb (Access VB script) and instructions for running it. #pubcon @lindacaplinger
- 47. 47 FURTHER READING eConsultancy: Site Search for eCommerce: 13 Tips Google: How Site Search Metrics are Calculated Google Dev: Structured Data and GCS eConsultancy: Four Reasons Why Site Search is Vital for Online Retailers Download this: http://sitesearch.sli-systems.com/eBook-2013-01-01- BBoSST-USA.html #pubcon @lindacaplinger
Editor's Notes
- Linda Caplinger from NVIDIA Corporation in Santa Clara, California I lead global search marketing strategy for the company. JP Sherman from Redhat just spoke to you about the psychology of onsite search and WHY you want to have search on your site and I’m going to try to tell you a few neat things you can do with it to add value. There are some great resources out there that talk about general site search principles – and I’m not going to recreate their work. You’ll find links to the good stuff at the end of my presentation. I’m more interested in squeezing the juice out of internal site search.
- I’ve been working in search for 16 years. And it feels like a long time.
- I’ve been fortunate to work for some truly stellar brands. And besides medicine, I never thought I’d do something the same for this LONG. I worked on the director and internal search programs for Yahoo, Symantec, McAfee, and NVIDIA. Microsoft was a consulting gig where my claim to fame was naming the Bing Toolbox. Software Companies: McAfee, Symantec – both Anti-Virus companies, and then SAP’s Global Search Marketing Lead in NYC (mostly SEO, Internal Search and Paid) And now….NVIDIA where I do a bit of everything search. Types of search products that I’m worked on and are most familiar with: Google Search Appliance (GSA) or Enterprise search Google Custom Search Google Site Search
- Internal Search Optimization, or iSEO as I like to call it. The process of optimizing your site’s internal search results To help users find information Via a query As fast as possible And To take them to the most relevant results. When you think about it, it’s sort of a combination of SEO, paid search, and UX skills all wrapped up in one and this is what I’m going to dive into today.
- Let’s focus on the last item.
- Your navigation might be bad. Many companies organize their site navigation according to how their BUs are structured rather than how a user might look for content or products. For instance, can we all agree on what a small business is as compared to a medium sized business? Related to having a confusing nav structure: Your content or Information Architecture (IA) might ALSO be organized in a confusing manner. Sometimes the language that we use on our site is “inside out”. We use what I call “Marketing-ese” rather than the customer language. We like to say “notebook” when our customers are really querying for “laptops”. Sometimes the organic landing page just fails to deliver. The meta description says one thing but the page content is thin or not deep enough. Sometimes users just don’t trust your site and they head straight to the search box. These folks are “impatient”.
- Content: What content do you want to be crawled and displayed? You might have multiple subdomains or websites you want the user to find. Or forums. With Google custom search, you can even point your engine to crawl a site you don’t even own. Results: Once the user gets to your landing page, then what? Can they sort or filter? Can they narrow results? And then there’s the entire User Experience: How do you make it easy for the customer to find what they want?
- How many of you are already doing SEO and SEM? What is key here is that if you are already doing SEO and SEM, you have the skills you need to optimize your search results. Of course you might need a bit of technical help INSTALLING your search engine (and that’s what your IT team is for), but the rest is fairly straightforward.
- In the end, it’s the difference between these two very different experiences for the user. Call out what’s important. Bake in pivotability. Break your search results into tasty bite size pieces for your visitor.
- You have a default way that your search results appear. Those can be customized for look, feel… to have images (or not) to show the URL (or not) Part of customizing the content you deliver to the searcher is what are called “promoted results”, or if you are using Google Search Appliance, “Key Matches”. This is an area that’s often overlooked by whoever controls onsite search. Google Search Appliance (GSA) – often called Enterprise Search – server or “blade” that crawls your content (internal or external site). Crawls YOUR results. Google Custom Search – a view of the “organic results” (with respect to search collections that you point it at). There are a lot of players in this space but we’ll just go into Google Search today. I’m going to focus on creating promoted search results for Google “ search products.
- . Benefits of customizing your promoted search results So, we know a few reasons why users use the search box and that provides a natural starting point for why you want to use it. But there are also a few other reasons: Configuring your search results page lets you control what the user sees to a large degree. You can point visitors to sections of your site (or other sites!) that aren’t being crawled by your search engine. In creating custom links you can drop customers directly into the sales funnel. You can bubble up what you feel are the best or most relevant (or highest AOV) items. In the end, it just makes for happier site visitors.
- The added benefit, is that you get immediate gratification. Results are quick. SEO takes time. Paid search is nearly immediate.
- These are the 7 steps that I use for creating Promoted Results or KeyMatches: Get your onsite search data Scrub it Cluster or group together like-terms Pull out the low-hanging-fruit Write & optimize your ad copy (like you would for paid search) Integrate the most relevant (and hopefully the highest converting) URL to point the user at Add tracking parameters if you want (you can integrate Google URL UTM codes, Digital River CIDs, etc) And launch. One at a time now.
- Collect data on the terms that people are searching for on your site. You’re probably using Google Analytics to track internal search. If you’re using Microsoft Fast or other tools, there will be data you can grab. If you want to iron out seasonal variations and anomalies, get lots of data. Maybe a year’s worth. Expect your data set to be HUGE. If you want to create campaigns for recent behaviour, maybe just grab a month. Export it all to a spreadsheet. What you need are the full query string AND query instances. At Symantec, we started with the top 50,000 queries. That’s a lot of data. Trust me, there’s going to be a great deal of duplication in your data set so you’ll need to scrub your data.
- Cleaning data is the most fun and frustrating part of this exercise. Many internal search engines will ignore stop words. Also, thinking like paid search, the default search type in GSA and Google Custom Search is similar to a broad match type. Google calls the promoted query that you are going to build a KEYMATCH. If you enter the keymatch “Tegra” into your engine, it’ll return results for “Tegra processor”, “Tegra Tab” and any other query unless you tell it not to. So, a customized result for “Tegra” in your engine, might cover many many more queries than just “Tegra” alone. So clean out all of the stop words, characters, and so forth. Convert all your data to lowercase. tegra lowercase and TEGRA uppercase will pull up the same search result. Yes? Right. And we don’t want to waste time creating two search results for Tegra. Once clean, sort your data A through Z. Remove all of the duplicates. Give your data a sanity check. Did you remove all of the stopwords and random characters? Leave the misspellings in there. You want those. You might need to do this a few times to get to a list that you can work with. You are trying to scrub the data so that you are left with truly unique queries in the ed. It’s also interesting to see, much your data set was reduced by this process. This helps you understand how scalable this will be if you need to localize this to other regions or sites.
- The next two steps sort of work together. They’re not necessarily done in a linear fashion. First: keep in mind that GSA and Google Custom Search default to broad match in that a single term is wildcarded and will cover a great number of queries that contain that term. Look at the Tegra example. I see 4 queries that all contain Tegra. I can create a “Tegra” keymatch and ad copy in GSA that will cover all query permutations that contain Tegra. Remember: you want to: Write once, and use over and over. Also: think “broad match” when you’re starting out.
- The next two steps sort of work together. They’re not necessarily done in a linear fashion. First: keep in mind that GSA and Google Custom Search default to broad match in that a single term is wildcarded and will cover a great number of queries that contain that term. Look at the Tegra example. I see 4 queries that all contain Tegra. I can create a “Tegra” keymatch and ad copy in GSA that will cover all query permutations that contain Tegra. Remember: you want to: Write once, and use over and over. Also: think “broad match” when you’re starting out.
- Keep an eye out for queries that you know are associated to high AOVs, high CVR, and so forth. If you have a very high value query, something that’s important to your company, you can actually create what’s called an ExactMatch keymatch where you have one KeyMatch that shouldn’t pull in other permutations. (Doesn’t always work as it should, but for the most part it does). Also keep an eye out for queries that are more lead gen focused, or might cover different areas of the conversion funnel. You may find something happen that we call “bleed”, where one result bleeds into the result of another. For example: What if you have one keymatch entry for Tegra queries And another for “mobile processors” And then someone does a query for “Tegra Mobile Processors”? You might see two ads show up at the same time. You can solve this with the ExactMatch function.
- Now this step is not a lot different than writing ad copy for Adwords. Make sure the query term is in the title and the description. For GSA, the query will show up bolded by default in the search results. Your developer may have turned this off. If they have, revert it back. Depending on your engine installation, your URL may or may not show up. If it’s long and convoluted, you can use a shortener or a vanity. Try to include a CTA. And of course, images are nearly always compelling and can boost your click through rates. Also worth mentioning for those of you in large organizations is that Google Search Engines will show 3 (or 5?) promoted search results. You may find, over time, that as people in your organization see how well this works particular business units (or Bus) may pressure you to let them own all of the promoted results. Not a great user experience. You may even find yourself in the position of having to create a policy for your company that given three results, one is for B2C, one for B2B, and one for support related results. Sometimes creating such a policy keeps competing interests from polluting your search results. Also, when the user’s query is ambiguous, and you don’t know precisely what they are looking for, try to show a good mixture of promoted search results. Spread the love over your different organizations.
- When you’re thinking of where to point users, try to grab the most relevant landing page possible. Think of Google’s quality score when you’re creating your ad copy and destination URL. Not only does your ad copy need to contain the query term, your landing page needs to resonate with the user that, “Aha! This is it!” If it doesn’t resonate, they’ll bounce, they’ll search again, and eventually your promoted search results will not be seen as being trustworthy. For generic organic queries, Google likes to show you Wikipedia results. It just doesn’t know what you want. For a very generic query where you aren’t sure where to take the user, you might want to provide a mix of results, a “What is a..” page, a “glossary” page or other area that is high level. Akin to the previous slide, for some companies this might mean providing three results: one small business, one medium, one enterprise. Or some similar division. And again, if your program takes off and you are at a large company, you may need to create a process for “who owns which keymatch” (or do they all have to share)?
- I like to add conversion tracking in my Promoted Search results so I can prove value. If you’re not directing users to pages where they’re going to convert, or if your web dev resources are scanty, you can always add in a hash and then a parameter so that you can easily parse the data out of your weblogs for page hits.
- This is a great place for a sitemap. Telling the user to use the tabs at the top isn’t really useful. The links at the bottom might be better. Look at queries that generate zero results – perhaps they are just misspellings that can be added as alternates to existing promoted results.
- Very meager data. Not that exciting. Integrate with Google Analytics and view over on the GA site.
- You can also get onsite search queries straight from Google Analytics. Behaviour > Site Search > Search Terms There’s some great data here beyond raw numbers of times people searched for a term. These analytics are for what happened after a person did a query – these are quite informative! How many times they viewed the results page after doing a query. The percentage of visitors that left after viewing a result from an internal search. How long your visitors stayed on your site after generating their results. How many pages they viewed after generating their results.
- So, did it work? To reiterate what you want to track: Bounce rates Repeat queries Page consumption (may or may not be a good thing) Conversions (whatever that might be to you)
- Once you’ve gone through the previous steps, you’re ready to push out your search results. You’ll want to test variations of ad copy, images, and destination URLS. Like paid search, continually optimize. You’ll also want to analyze which queries do NOT result in ANY search results for your user. In these cases you’ll probably want to create a customized landing page that reflects their query back to them, maybe they misspelled something, and offer to help them find what they’re looking for. Lastly, you’ll want to compare your list of KeyMatches in your search engine to the actual query logs and determine what queries are NOT addressed by your KeyMatch settings. I do this in Access. I had a developer friend create a script for me that I run in Access that takes the two lists of data (queries and volumes) versus (KeyMatches), scrubs the query data, and then churns out a list of which queries are still not KeyMatched. Essentially, it isolates the queries I still need to create KeyMatches for. It’s handy.
- There are a few extra slides in the appendix for other things you can do to improve your site’s internal search results. Please feel free to email me directly for any questions.
- SAP did a great job on meta tagging their content for pivot capabilities.