Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.
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Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers
By Louis Rosenfeld
Rosenfeld Media, LLC 457 Third Street, #4R Brooklyn, New York 11215 USA
On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com Please send errors to: [email protected]
Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld Developmental Editor: Stephanie Zhong Managing Editor: Marta Justak Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster Cover Design: The Heads of State Indexer: Nancy Guenther Proofreader: Chuck Hutchinson
All Rights Reserved ISBN: 1-933820-04-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-04-0 LCCN: 2011907226
Dedication
To Mary Jean, Iris, and Nate, who generously gave me the time to write this book.
And to my mother and father, whose talents at cheating time I hope to emulate.
How to Use This Book
Who Should Read This Book?
I wrote this book primarily for user experience practitionersâthe people who are responsible for a Web site or intranetâs information architecture, content strategy, design, usability, and just about anything else that impacts a siteâs users. I especially wanted to help those practitioners see how analyzing searchersâ behaviors is just another critical tool, like task analysis, personas, and field studies, that belongs in their user research toolkits.
There are also many people in the web analytics community who havenât turned their attention toward analyzing and improving site search. SSA belongs in their toolkit, so this book is for web analytics practitioners as well.
Honestly, if your Web site or intranet has its own search engine, then you should find something here thatâs worth at least the price of the book.
Whatâs in This Book?
If youâre new to SSA, read the first two chapters: they consist of a case study that demonstrates how SSA made a difference at The Vanguard Group and a quick one-chapter introduction to get you up and running.
If youâre ready to jump right in, the second section is full of tools and approaches to help you get the most out of analyzing your query data. Chapter 3âChapter 6 will be especially helpful if you want to gain new insights from your data. Chapter 7 will help you use the data to measure how well your site is performing against the goals youâve already determined for it.
The third section introduces some of the very practical ways to improve your search systemâs performance, as well as your siteâs navigation, metadata, and content. You can start tryingâand benefiting fromâmany of these tips right away.
The last chapter takes a step back from site search analytics and looks at how its parent disciplinesâuser experience and web analyticsâdiffer and ultimately complement each other in a surprisingly elegant way. If youâre looking to bridge these disciplines within your own organization, this chapter provides advice, and I hope some inspiration. Spoiler alert: SSA might be just the thing to bring the two of them together.
Part I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part II
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part III
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Section Four: Coda
Chapter 11
What Comes with this Book?
This bookâs companion Web site (
http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/searchanalytics/) contains some templates, discussion, and additional content related to site search analytics. Youâll also find a calendar of my upcoming workshops and talks on site search analytics. Iâve also made the bookâs diagrams and other illustrations available under a Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at
www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/.
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Table of contents
Search Analytics for Your Site: Conversations with Your Customers
