We’ve heard it from some of the world’s best brands: Search and Discovery are critical to the user experience, yet it can be difficult to measure their impact on revenue.

It is not hard to understand why: in the past couple of decades, it’s become an industry norm that any consumer-grade search tool is simply too hard for non-technical, business teams to manage. And yet it’s exactly those business teams — digital strategists, product managers, merchandisers, marketers and content editors — who are most in need of the ability and agility to optimize Search and Discovery across online properties. They are also the ones most directly focused on ROI and improving business results.

What irony, then, that business users are left to log IT tickets and wait days or weeks for enhancements that may grow the business, while taking up precious developer time.

Our Winter ‘20 release is focused on changing that paradigm. We are delivering a suite of tools to empower business teams to analyze and optimize their users’ search and discovery journeys, thus directly unlocking business value and delivering growth.

 

New Search Experience Management tools: analyze, optimize, and iterate on relevance strategies

When done right, search can be a powerful multiplier in terms of business results. The key factor: relevance. Delivering search results that are sophisticated enough to both fit the searcher’s intent and deliver on business needs (promoting a seasonal product or a trending piece of news) is difficult. Modern merchandising and editorial strategies are changing at the speed of (consumer) thought; having tools to enable them is critical.

Enter Search Experience Management (SXM).

Visual Editor: simple technology for complex strategies

With a powerful drag-and-drop interface, our new Visual Editor enables editorial and merchandising teams to have full control of the search and discovery experience.

“With Algolia’s Visual Editor and dashboard, we’ve improved our customers’ search and browsing experience, as well as reduced our no-results rate by over 60%. In addition, our local merchandising teams have been able to easily pin and hide products to make them match our local merchandising strategies.”
Richard Migette, E-commerce Leader at Decathlon Singapore

Here are just a few Visual Editor use cases.

• Visualizing relevance strategies on the fly. An envisioned relevance strategy might fail due to a missing detail in a product description, or poor data in your product catalog. Visual Editor lets you visualize your actual search to make sure results show up for the user as planned — then easily rearrange, remove and adjust views as needed.

 

• Filtering results. Visual editor lets a merchandising team filter search results on the back end, making sure, for example, that only a select brand’s products show up when users are looking for a specific item.

 

• Boosting and pinning items and categories. A media company might want to showcase a healthy mix of premium and free content to increase conversions. Pinning premium articles on top of category pages or boosting exciting seasonal articles will encourage non-paying users to eventually subscribe.

Until today, this type of capability came with tools that don’t have the accompanying speed, relevance, or infrastructure to support modern online experiences.

Enhanced Analytics for more visibility and insights

A critical part of Search Experience Management is understanding the performance of your search data. Search has its own set of KPIs: search volume, click-through rates, and conversions, to name a few. Our latest Analytics capabilities let you go beyond defining and tracking those key metrics: we want you to see the big picture in your search analytics data.

• Trend reporting gives you immediate feedback from your users about how they engage with your application

 

• Comparing different date ranges

 

• Multi-tag filtering: focus the analysis on specific criteria such as devices, customer profile, etc.

These features will give you better and faster insights, more control, and even more ways to evaluate your search data.

Capture insights events via Segment and Google Tag Manager

Today, we are giving you two new connectors for Segment and Google Tag Manager, enabling you to forward events to Algolia from the places where you already track them.

Advanced analytics require collecting signals sent by users:

• Which search results do they click on, when and from which device?
• Which content do they go through or add to their wish list?
• What product do they add to cart?

Until now, Algolia offered only one option to collect this type of data: using our own Click Analytics. The new connectors allow customers who are already using Segment or Google Tag Manager to send their user behavior data to Algolia Analytics by simply adding Algolia as a destination for Segment or using the Algolia Google Tag Manager template. In both cases, the setup is fast and requires minimal effort.

 

Site Search for corporate websites

As a consumer, you probably know how hard it is to navigate corporate websites. You might visit a company site looking for a product, training, documentation, the FAQ, investor information, or even a blog post. On the backend, the company has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to produce that very content you’d like to see. Yet, it seems impossible to find.

As a business, you know how difficult it is to organize all your marketing content into an optimal information architecture, especially as the modern corporate site must serve so many different types of visitors: customers, prospects, IT and business people… and so your great content never sees the light of day.

Our Site Search is changing this by removing content silos, letting your visitors find exactly what they need — with the same ease they do on Google or Amazon, while letting your business unlock this often overlooked but powerful pocket of business value.

Powered by the mighty Algolia Crawler

The Algolia Crawler is the tool that makes Site Search possible, unifying your content into a single delivery platform.The Crawler automatically does the hard work for you: browsing your website, extracting the important information, and indexing the data in Algolia seamlessly.

But unlike other crawlers that you’ll find on the market, the Algolia Crawler is heavily customizable:

• You can crawl multiple types of files
• It allows you to enrich the extracted content with business data, like Google Analytics data
• It comes with is own monitoring suite

And there is more. On that note…

We want you to learn more

The above are the most important features and updates we are rolling out as part of our Winter ‘20 release. Interested in learning more about Search Experience Management or additional components of this release? Watch our webinar where we go into more depth, and give you live demonstrations and customer examples.