While Jerome is busy posting about the in’s and out’s of implementing Search&Promote, I thought I’d wade in with a post on why businesses should consider their search as a missed opportunity.

I’ve previously posted on what I think is a hidden gold mine of information called internal search. It’s an area of the site that many companies, quite frankly, ignore.

“Not too sure how to do anything with it, we assume it’s working just fine serving up results to random queries, so we’ll leave it alone and focus on our core purpose, driving people into our conversion funnel.”

Or something along those lines.

If that’s you, go stand in front of a mirror and slap yourself a few times! Wake up and smell the coffee…there’s much more to search than that!

“I can’t find anything!”

This is the most common response we came across during the scoping and implementation of Search and Promote as the new internal search for Murdoch University.

Hardly surprising, given the issues with internal search that I covered in my previous post, but amazingly consistent!

In fact, one of the great truths we found during this project is that people truly don’t care where content is located, or whether it’s authenticated and/or accessible – they just wanted to type something in the search box, immediately find what they’re looking for, then carry on with their work.

We’ve now completed the implementation across our internal sites, and it’s working really well – so well that we’re now 2-3 weeks away from covering our external sites.

So I promised that I would finally put fingertip to keyboard and talk a little bit more about using Visitor Scoring…to finish up the series that I started a while ago.

If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that we implemented a series of metrics for engagement measurement, culminating in a per-visitor score.

I wanted to share with you some of the insights and benefits of doing all of this, particularly in Discover.

When it comes to searching across the web, we all know that Google is king, but does this still hold true across your own internal network?

Over the past 12 months we have wrestled with this question, particularly in an environment with multiple search mechanisms, manually maintained indexes, and masses of sites that were created when metadata was primarily used to categorise instead of search.

While this might be a quickie, it’s a biggy. A big one in terms of the amount of data just uploaded through SAINT. In fact, we’ve just uploaded around 1 million rows of data, with 6 columns per row.

And it didn’t even blink! Gotta love that!

So why do we have a million rows of data?

Customer segmentation of course.

Here’s another really simple customisation that you can and should do as part of your basic implementation, which helps you to further understand attribution.

Attribution is probably one of the hardest and most contested measurements available…which “thing” led your customer to do something. Read on to find out more about stacking in SiteCatalyst.

Many companies struggle with an effective digital measurement strategy, often due to the lack of resources or the lack of understanding how it can provide an effective return on the investment.

And it is an investment. Generally you’ll incur people and training costs and you’ll incur licensing costs for the various platforms. These are all ongoing costs.

But you can demonstrate an ROI that will far outweigh the costs incurred, if you spend the time and effort in putting a solid strategy together. Read on to see the 6 key elements to a successful measurement strategy.