There’s no excuse nowadays not to be optimizing across multiple channels. There’s heaps of tools available from no cost tools to paid tools and there’s plenty of consultants willing to help you get out there and lead you down a path of optimization.

Just remember though, 90% of optimization is done by people, only 10% by the tool. It’s people that create the optimization strategy, the ideas to test, the segments, the content, the creative and of course, the insights that come from the results – both good and bad.

So how do you know if free is ok or whether you should invest in something a little more robust? It depends how serious you are about optimization. It also depends on what analytic tools you run as well. It depends on what you actually want to achieve.

“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.

This topic was requested by one of my readers – thanks for the inspiration Dan.

And it comes back to segmentation. And the value derived from measuring your customers/members behaviors across your digital channels, and the impact they could be having on your conversion rates if you don’t segment.

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.