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SLI Blog

YouTube Search Suggestions

Posted by Shaun RyanWeb Search1 comment

Last week You Tube announced that they will optionally show you search suggestions as you type. I really like this feature – it helps people formulate queries in an intuitive and familiar way. Most browsers have a similar functionality that will show previous queries you have entered – so people don’t have to learn anything new to use this. 

My main complaint is that it is not on by default. You have to click on the advanced link beside the search box and select the option. So very few people will use it. I’ve also see some suggestions that don’t have any results – they need to make sure this doesn’t happen. However these are minor complaints. I’m sure this is a trend we will see more of.

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ExactTarget’s Route 1 to 1 seminar visits Toronto and Minneapolis

Posted by geoffbeCommerce

This week SLI Systems will be visiting Toronto, ON and Minneapolis, MN as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

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Some passion about site search

Posted by Shaun RyanSite Search

Steven Seiller wrote an article outlining the 11 things he hates about site search. He makes some good points and captures the passion that people feel when site search isn’t there, can’t be found, or doesn’t work.  You need to have site search, make it highly visible and it should be flawless. This is not easy to do and the disappointing thing is that if you do it well most visitors won’t notice it (people notice things that don’t work properly) – but they will be happier and will get more from your site.

I may sound like a broken record here – but if you want to improve your site search we would love to show you what we can do. Contact us and we’ll try to dazzle you.

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Search Log Junk

Posted by Shaun RyanSite Search

Avi Rappoport did an excellent post on search log junk. This is the set of queries that aren’t very useful  when you’re analyzing search logs, mostly from crawlers, hackers and spammers. We see a lot of these types of queries and constantly trying to block them and remove them from our reporting – so we can extract useful information. I hadn’t seen anyone talking about this before – but it is something else you need to be aware of when you’re trying to extract the valuable information that is in search logs.

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ExactTarget’s Route 1 to 1 seminar visits Cincinnati and Chicago

Posted by geoffbeCommerce

Next week SLI Systems will be visiting Cincinnati, OH and Chicago, IL as part of the ExactTarget Route 1 to 1 seminar series.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

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Watch Now – Strategies for Optimizing Search-Driven Revenue

Posted by geoffbWebinar
webinar_apr2008_archive.gif There is no question that search drives revenue: it brings customers to your site, it connects customers to products, and it can be used to trigger relevant offers on your site. Making the most of your search opportunity isn’t simple: you have SEO, paid search, paid inclusion, advertising, site search, and site merchandising. All seem to have different paradigms, tools, reporting and lingo, and making trade-offs can be a challenge. But there are steps you can take to optimize your customers’ search experience, and reap increased and more profitable revenue as a result.

Watch this free webinar to hear:

  • How marketers manage their search campaigns and tools, based on a survey of marketing executives
  • How a leading retailer achieved 10x expected incremental revenue through automated user-generated search optimization
  • The impact of recommendations and personalization on revenue
  • A practical approach to testing online campaigns
  • Whether search results pages convert better than category pages.

Takeaways: At the close of this session, you will:

  • Compare your own search-driven revenue results to our benchmark (Sue is presenting her survey results)
  • Understand better how to automate search optimization for the long tail of searches
  • Be able to apply proven tactics for testing email and PPC campaigns
  • Gain useful insights on your products and services based on the language of your visitors and customers

Speakers

  • Ed Hoffman – VP of Worldwide Field Operations – SLI Systems
  • Sue Aldrich – Senior Vice President, Senior Consultant/Analyst – Particia Seybold Group
  • Jay Greenberg – Director, eCommerce – Spencer’s

Watch Now

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Exact Target’s Route 1 to 1 seminar visits Atlanta and New York this week

Posted by geoffbeCommerce

SLI along with Salesforce.com and Omniture are sponsoring Exact Target’s Route 1 to 1 seminar series titled “The New eMarketing Essentials”. This 13 city seminar tour will help put email, analytics, CRM and search solutions to work in ways that will help your marketing investments perform better.

This week we will be in Atlanta, GA on Tuesday April 22 and in New York City on Thursday April 24.

For more information on the various cities and to register visit the Route 1 to 1 site.

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PowerReviews vs Bazaarvoice

Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce5 comments

Jay Shaffer, the VP of Marketing for our partner PowerReviews, wrote an interesting post last week about their competitor Bazaarvoice (who is also one of our partners). It’s interesting because Jay is openly accusing Bazaarvoice of trying to copy some of the PowerReviews capabilities. It’s a very aggressive approach to this sort of problem.

While not taking sides in this issue (as they are both our partners), we typically try not to be so openly critical of our competitors in these situations because we don’t want to highlight them or tell them what they’re doing wrong.

As to the validity of what Jay is saying – I’ll let you read his post and talk to each company to decide for yourself. Because they’re both partners of ours I’ll remain neutral. We do have customers who are happy with the service from each of these companies. As far as I know they are the only vendors out there who will help you implement reviews on your site (let me know if I’m wrong). We have some customers who implement reviews themselves – as a rule I would recommend against this – the experts will do a better job (it applies to site search as well – but I’m biased about that). However I do recommend having reviews on your site – there are many benefits.

I doubt Bazaarvoice will respond directly – they probably don’t want to have a public slinging match.

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Site search conversion data from Coremetrics

Posted by Shaun RyaneCommerce, Site Search

Last week Coremetrics announced that they making free ecommerce data available to their customers for benchmarking. Their announcement included some sample data including the fact that 15% of consumers used site search, resulting in a conversion rate of 5.6%. The conversion rate is interesting when compared to some of the other conversion rates in the sample data: from natural search traffic the conversion rate is 1.66%; from comparison shopping engines and affiliate networks it is 1.97%; and from direct load it is 3.29%.

This is yet more evidence showing that the conversion rates for people who use site search are relatively high.

As to the question around the value of the benchmarks – I think they’re still worth having even though it is hard to compare because of the variety of ways of measuring metrics like conversion rates.

Cremetrics Benchmarking data

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SMX Sydney recap

Posted by Shaun RyanSearch Conferences1 comment

For those of you who couldn’t make it – here’s a recap of day one at SMX Sydney by Neerav Bhatt. Neerav wrote up SLI as one of the vendors with interesting products and snapped this picture of the intrepid traveller Ed Hoffman.

Ed at SMX

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