Omniture Launches Analytics-Driven Site Search

Omniture just announced SiteSearch. It’s on-demand solution for marketers who want greater control and increased conversion results through analytics-powered site search.

“Analytics-driven site search is more effective for online businesses because it achieves targeted results based on real data,” said Aseem Chandra, senior vice president of product marketing at Omniture. “Commerce sites can set rules to automatically adjust search results based on shopper trends and seasonality of items, media sites can offer article popularity sorting into the presentation of their search results, and corporate sites can offer better self-service and support by promoting the most frequently sought after support content. Omniture continues to give customers marketing advantages that lead to increased conversion with Web analytics as a foundation.”

The software promises to let marketers automatically guide visitors to the highest converting products and most relevant content based on analytics-driven business rules and online metrics. Omniture SiteSearch optimizes the ranking of site search results based on any visitor metric. You can optimize based on most requested pages, best selling items and entry pages, to improve online business results.

If it works as described, this is powerful technology. As you’ve heard me say many times on this blog, it’s not merely about traffic and measuring hits. We’re way, way beyond that and we need to have what I like to call a “conversion mindset.” That all ties in with Conversion Design and Conversion Content. We can employ our philosophies, but we have to measure them to make sure they work.

According to a worldwide study of retail executives, improving online shopping tools, such as site search, was cited by 34 percent as a leading method for increasing online sales (”Playing Well With Others: eCommerce’s Evolving Role in the Customer Experience,” Retail Systems Research, August 2008). Gartner forecasts spending on enterprise search software will grow 11 percent annually from $989 million in 2008 to $1.475 Billion in 2012 (Gartner Dataquest Insight: Technology and Vendor Consolidation Will Drive the Enterprise Search Market Through 2012, published in February 2008).

“Integrating analytics and site search technology gives Web sites a powerful tool for driving visitor conversion,” said Rebecca Wetteman, vice president at Nucleus Research, a leading provider of investigative information technology research and advisory services.

“With so many customers using search to find products and services on a site, companies must be able to control the promotion of their top performing content in a data-driven manner. Omniture SiteSearch gives marketers this control, with the ability to dynamically tune search results using data from SiteCatalyst’s broad array of performance measurement metrics.”