Last week we announced our 5th birthday. Looking back, the five years seems to have gone very fast but it is a milestone we are proud to have reached.

SLI was born out of the ashes of Globalbrain which had been sold to the then internet giant, NBCi. At it’s peak NBCi had been the 6th most visited site in the US. The founders of SLI saw that there was a huge opportunity to use the search technology we had developed for GlobalBrain/NBCi to improve site search. At the time site search on most sites was appalling. On average it is a lot better now - especially our customers’ sites :). But it is amazing how many sites out there still have terrible search.

August 2001 was in the middle of the dot com crash and just before September 11. It was a hard time to start a company and it was difficult to find customers. That experience has helped shape the culture of SLI. We treasured the customers we were able to get and did everything we could to look after them. We still have the culture of looking after our customers and I’m sure it will see us well into the future.

The future for SLI is exciting. We have been profitable for the last three years and our business is sustainable. We are almost doubling our customers each year. I’m looking forward to the next five years and want to thank the SLI team and our customers for a rewarding half decade.

There has been a lot of noise recently from our competitors about merchandising. We see it in their marketing and we hear it from our prospective customers. Our competitors are saying that they offer merchandising controls and we don’t. I have found this to be an interesting exercise and I must admit initially I was confused as to what they were talking about - I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what they meant. We host the search for over 100, predominantly e-commerce sites and usually cater to all their requests. So what could these mysterious merchandising features be?

I did some research, including sitting in on a couple of our competitors webinars (using the deceptive pseudonym of Shaun Ryan, CEO of SLI Systems, Inc). It ends up we already offer most of the merchandising features they were talking about - we just don’t call them by the same name.

So, to clear up the confusion, we have set up a page summarizing some of our merchandising capabilities. We’re going to be updating it and linking to examples of our customers who are taking advantage of these capabilities. If you take a look I think you’ll find we’re extremely competitive. Watch this space - there’s more coming.

The lesson from this - if you’re looking to buy site search (or anything for that matter) don’t always believe what one vendor says about the other. Unless of course you’re talking to us :-).

Google and the other search engines allow you to specify different matching options in paid search campaigns. I would like to share some data we have collected on the different conversion rates.

When people discuss these matching options they consistently say that you’ll get more traffic from broad match than exact match but you’ll get better conversion rates with exact match. What I haven’t been able to find is any data on how much better the conversion rates are - so we did an experiment with one of our customers to estimate the differences between the options.

The client used in the experiment was a small consumer electronics retailer. We automatically created a Google campaign using our Ad Champion service but for every keyword we put in both a broad match and an exact match. We bid the same amount on both the broad and exact match keywords and we used the same landing page for both. In this case the landing page was the most popular product page from site search. We ran this test for one month.

For the broad match campaign the value of the sales were 2.3 times the cost of the advertising (not a very good ROI for low margin products). For the exact match campaign the value of the sales were 12 times the cost of the advertising. So the exact match campaign gave us a 5.2 times better return on investment than the broad match campaign.

It’s been a while since my last blog post. Things have been so busy since the last show I have struggled to find time to blog. However there has been lots happening. For starters, we’ve done a couple more shows, signed some new customers and hired more people. On top of that SLI turned 5 years old and we’ve been celebrating. I’m going to try to find more time to blog. Incidentally a story in ecommerce guide mentioned us today.