Guiding Visitors to Become Customers with Hosted Search
People visit retail and corporate Web sites to obtain information about services and products. To virtually window shop on a retail Web site, for example, they can browse product pages until they find a desired product. If they already know what they want, browsing is usually too slow. Research shows that, if they do not locate the product they want in three clicks, they stop looking and the company may lose their prospective business forever. That is why, according to Jupiter Research, 90% of visitors who make online purchases use site search in the process of researching and buying products.
A home page functions as a company's virtual lobby. Browsing different sections of a site is like taking the stairs from the lobby to different departments. Using search to find a product is like taking the elevator directly to the department you already know you need. Because it is so direct and precise, search is especially effective in enabling online sales. All other things being equal, anything a company can do to optimize the effectiveness of its search engine will maximize those sales. The approach and methods you choose can have a big impact on both your revenue and your profit.
Hosted Search—Superior to Installed Search
There are two types of search products—installed and hosted:
Installed search products are loaded onto a customer's servers and managed by the IT team. For implementation, they require a large up-front investment in software licenses, hardware and staff. For example, companies need a project manager to plan and track deployment, programmers to integrate the search with the backend database, QA engineers to assure quality of the designs and IT engineers to monitor, maintain and upgrade the system. Installed products can also take months to deploy and, as the state-of-the-art improves, can become obsolete in a year.
What's more, if the customer's infrastructure is not robust, the search can execute slowly or less reliably. Furthermore, remote access is time-consuming; authors and administrators must log into a VPN, and every time content is changed, they have to remember to re-index the Web site or create a custom process to assure search results are up to date. Finally, the total cost of ownership (TCO) can be more than three times the cost of the software license. Unfortunately, such expense does not guarantee system reliability because the customer has no service level agreement (SLA) with the vendor. In contrast, with hosted search, companies lease the search application, servers and network connection from a vendor whose IT staff deploys, manages and upgrades them. Costs are lower up-front because the subscription fee is spread out over time and deployment, management and upgrades are included. Hosted search service providers also have world-class infrastructure, so search results are lightning fast. Most importantly, the total cost of ownership is lower than installed search and reliability is guaranteed by the service provider's SLA.
In short, hosted search costs less and provides greater return on investment and better reliability than the installed alternative.
Integrating Search with Content Management
If hosted search is integrated with content management, companies gain additional benefits. For example, marketing and service staff can create promotions without having to know HTML by using templates to embed images and content into the search results page to promote, say, a high-margin product. palmOne has used this strategy with Atomz to promote its various handheld products. For example, visitors to the company's Web site, www.palmone.com, can search for information about the Zire product line by entering "Zire" in the search field. On the results page, marketing has embedded a special marketing message for the Zire 72 handheld. Visitors can buy the product with just a few clicks instead of having to browse the results. Of course, online retailers can link promotions to different products with other key words to promote them for different reasons—say, if they want to sell a complementary product. Such a strategy quantifiably improves sales and directly affects a company's bottom line. palmOne, for example, improved its search-to-purchase conversion rate by 61% in this way.
Optimizing Results with Powerful Merchandising
Merchandising mechanisms can influence the relevancy of specific content on a Web site so that pages show up higher in the results list for given search terms. For instance, visitors interested in shoes on the Bloomingdales.com Web site can enter "shoes" in the search field. The shoes that appear higher in the results are typically newly stocked shoes since it is good practice to promote the latest fashions. Administrators are provided with interfaces where they can use different criteria to determine which items are shown earlier. If they wanted to promote a certain shoe brand, for example, "brand" could be the criterion. In addition, in the future, results will be programmatically influenced by visitor behavior through the combination of real-time Web site analytics and search. Users not only find what they are looking for, but businesses can perform sophisticated merchandising through a site's search function.
Agile and Rapid Deployment
Often companies discover that powerful search capabilities improve site performance after they have built a Web site. Many search products require that companies change the content and programming of their site during the deployment process, whereas with the hosted approach this is not the case. The hosted model allows for rapid deployment creating more online sales opportunities. For example, the search implementation for the Bloomingdales.com Web site was accomplished without their IT team having to make a single change except to add a search box to pages on the site. Indexing mechanisms can understand what sections of product pages have price, brand, color and other criteria and, if desired, can automatically pull this information into the index to create all metadata from scratch. This approach accelerates implementation so your IT staff does not have to waste time creating metadata manually.
Guided Search and Navigation Powered by Metadata
Maintaining the metadata on Web pages is key to unleashing the power of search. Each element of metadata associated with a Web page can be used to create navigation that will help the visitor find their preferred product. This enables what is called "faceted searching," allowing the visitor to gradually narrow down their search by clicking on a certain brand, then a style within that brand, then colors for those styles, and so on, until they find the products that they desire.
Optimized Search Means Maximized Sales
Search has been around as long as Web sites have, and for a good reason—it's the most efficient way to navigate a Web site. When deployed with enhancements like targeted promotions, guided search and navigation approaches, and powerful merchandising, search goes beyond a simple page of results—it drives sales and marketing leads. The primary job of an online retailer is to offer its customers compelling products. Without the aid of effective search, site visitors may never make it all the way to the products a company wants to sell most. Hosted search provides the best way for companies to incorporate this capability into their Web sites quickly and with little risk.
Atomz Corporation provides on-demand Web site solutions for site search, commerce search, and Web content management. These hosted solutions provide significant advantages over installed software in reliability, support, ease-of-use, scalability, rapid product innovation and predictable cost structures. The company's powerful products, unparalleled technical excellence and dedication to customer satisfaction have led solutions from Atomz to be adopted by more than 300 leading Web sites. Select customers include: Bloomingdale's, Fox Sports, LEGO, palmOne, Sharp Electronics, and Verizon Wireless. Atomz and its solutions have won numerous industry awards, including ASPnews.com's List of Top 25 Providers, Computerworld Innovative Technology Award, EContent 100 List, KMWorld 100 Companies that Matter, the AIIM E-DOC Best of Show Award for Web Content Management, and the SIIA's Codie Award for Best Enterprise Search Engine.