Everyone wants a tailored search experience, but not all search personalization tools are the same. Here are three things to know as you evaluate solutions.
The average person makes 3+ Google searches/day and relevant results are served up in milliseconds. It makes sense that customers and team members who come to your site expect to get exactly what they’re looking for in the blink of an eye.
Personalized search for the enterprise promises a better experience for users. Unfortunately, a lot of vendors promise personalization but it’s unclear what differentiates one product from another. Here, we break down three critical concepts to help you evaluate personalized search solutions.
1. Done well, search personalization is a set of tools working together not a single feature.
In marketing, “personalization” usually means automatically displaying someone’s first name in an email template. For search, it is more complex. The best solutions pull relevant data from a wide field of sources and then filters on the user’s behalf to get her the answer she needs as fast as possible.
The SearchAI suite of tools has been designed to work together to deliver powerful search results. With artificial intelligence, data from other search-centric tools like chatbots, search suggestions, and product ranking can each contribute input to meet the needs of your team members and customers automatically.
Ask:
What is the data source used for “personalized results?” Is it easy to scale up or down across the organization?
2. Effective Personalization Keeps User Data Private
As consumers take more care to own their own personal data, marketing teams and whole organizations are under pressure to provide individualized experiences while keeping customer information safe. Simply put, tools that rely on collecting and storing personal information put your organization at risk.
SearchBlox set out to address privacy challenges in a different way. In a process similar to how marketers build lookalike audiences for ad targeting, SearchAI Personalization collects anonymized data when a new user comes to the site, then aggregates it to create “search behavior personas” without storing any user-specific data. In as few as 30 days, search results are dramatically improved while still maintaining compliance with GDPR and CCPA.
Ask:
How is user data collected and stored? Does the vendor demonstrate commitment to compliance?
3. The Best Solutions Benefit End Users and Your Business, Simultaneously
Everyone can agree that “improved user engagement” is the number one success metric for personalized search. But what is engagement exactly and how is it measured?
For more complex organizations, leaders likely define and measure successful engagement differently. Whether it’s time on page, the number of pages visited, click-throughs, or making a purchase, the most powerful personalized search tools deliver fast, relevant results for the end users while feeding useful information back into the system.
Ask:
How does the search personalization tool measure and drive better engagement?