Website visitor data is everywhere. From website analytics, marketing automation systems, social media metrics to advertising and content syndication performance, there is no shortage of data coming in from those who engage with your site.

But do you really know why website visitors leave before purchasing or signing up for a demo?

Most likely, they can’t find what they need. This can mean one of two things; either the content does not exist or your site search engine is not intuitive enough to understand your user’s intent and therefore cannot surface the most relevant results. To solve both pain points, marketing teams need a powerful and in-depth understanding of their content and website performance. The most effective method for getting this information is an insight engine.

An “insight engine” is the latest evolution of site search, a change that speaks to the heart of marketers’ pain points with website data. Gartner defines an insight engine as “Insight engines apply relevancy methods to describe, discover, organize and analyze data. This allows existing or synthesized information to be delivered proactively or interactively, and in the context of digital workers, customers or constituents at timely business moments.”1

Coveo has been positioned furthest in the Leader Quadrant for Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute in the Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines. With the proof of quite a few customers for intelligent site search, Coveo has built a reputation for delivering the crucial insights through site search that marketers need to increase their conversion rate. Marketers using Coveo have seen results, such as increasing mobile conversions by 125 percent, tripling the searches per day from users, delivering a more effective user experience and enabling a more engaged customer base.

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines July 2018

How do your marketers get the insights to replicate these results for your company? Create a more effective search experience with an insight engine and leverage search analytics from the engine to create the content that your customers want and need.

Creating a More Effective Search Experience

Amazon is the largest online retailer in the world – but the experience is completely personalized for each user. External search engines, like Google and Bing, use every data point of users’ context to understand their intent and surface the most relevant results. Although these are not direct competitors, they have raised the bar for what visitors expect when they come to your site.

An insight engine is crucial to providing intelligence to the search experience that live up to your visitors’ expectations. Here are a few features to implement on your site search to more closely meet their expectations:

  • Proactive suggestions. Website visitors are using to interactive search boxes that help guide the formation of their query. Vendors today need to auto-complete search queries and take common spelling errors into account. An insight engine will continuously learn from similar users what content leads to successful outcomes, and automatically tune the results for relevance.
  • Customer-centric language. Content authors create content for many purposes: increase search engine ranking, elevate the brand profile, or even expand your current customer base. It’s important to use the real language your customers and prospects use to describe your product when searching. For example, you may view your product as enabling the digital oilfield and want to rank in search engines for that keyword – but to your customers, it’s just a mobile app for rig workers.
  • Predictive content recommendations. Provide the breadcrumbs to keep visitors exploring on your site. Don’t rely on gut feeling for the recommended content; an insight engine can help you understand what other visitors in a similar context found helpful.
  • Machine learning. Your website search is not a “set and forget.” Unless you have unlimited budgets and hours to spare for content authors, it’s time to apply machine learning to automatically personalize results to users’ context with an insight engine. Rather than manually identifying content that is relevant to specific buyer personas, machine learning and AI-powered search automatically personalizes search results and content to user context – based on the online behavior of similar users.  
  • Context-driven results. Website visitors look through a few blog posts on a certain topic before searching – are you using that behavior to help tailor their results? About 74 percent of website visitors expect some degree of personalization. Don’t fall behind.

 

Solving Your Content Gaps

No results.

This is the biggest sign that your customers and prospects are not getting what they need from your website. When they search for content related to your products, services or messaging, and the search query does not return results, they become missed opportunities for conversion.

Insight engines provide the robust analytics to help you determine where your content comes up short for customers. Here are the three steps to solve your content gaps:

    1. Invest in usage analytics to identify the queries and overall topics that are returning “no results” or results with low click-through rates. Don’t have this on your site? This is definitely worth investing in, especially if your website includes a lot of self-help content for customers. A robust analytics back-end provides the user-driven insights content authors need to fix content gaps.
    2. Identify any patterns in the analytics for short-term wins. What are the most popular search queries that return low relevance or no results? Are there easy changes you can make to page content or the relevance tuning? For example, some customers and prospects having trouble with a product will just enter the SKU if there are multiple different sizes or versions of a product, so adding the SKU to the product’s related content would increase the relevance of results.
    3. Use your usage analytics to guide your long-term content creation strategy. For the long-term strategy, use your content gaps to understand what your misconceptions are about user intent, and then re-align your content creation strategy to fix these content gaps for your website visitors.

To understand more about how insight engines can play a role in your initiatives, access your complimentary copy of the Gartner Magic Quadrant Report for Insight Engines:

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Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines July 2018

1. Gartner Magic Quadrant for Insight Engines, Whit Andrews, Guido De Simoni, Jim Murphy, Stephen Emmott, 20 March 2017.