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Product Description
Any organization that has a searchable web site or intranet is sitting on top of hugely valuable and usually under-exploited data: logs that capture what users are searching for, how often each query was searched, and how many results each query retrieved. Search queries are gold: they are real data that show us exactly what users are searching for in their own words. This book shows you how to use search analytics to carry on a conversation with your customers: listen to and understand their needs, and improve your content, navigation and search performance to meet those needs.
Testimonials"Search is one of those mission-critical aspects of every web site that is sadly all to often forgotten until the damage has already been done. Lou, on the other hand, is one of those guys who understands search analytics and the opportunity associated with digging into the nuance of customer and search behaviors to mine for organizational gold. In Search Analytics for your Site, Lou lays out pretty much everything you need to know to mine for that gold and convert it into positive customer experience on your site."
Eric T. Peterson, Founder and Author, Web Analytics Demystified
"Clients have asked me countless times to pretty up their search results page design, as if this would distract users from realizing that they're getting lousy results. That's no longer necessary, thanks to Lou's book."
Karen McGrane, Managing Partner, Bond Art + Science
"At last a book that explains exactly how to get the best from search analytics so that users can actually find what they are looking for."
Martin White, Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd, and author of Making Search Work
"Analytics are the single most important tool you have to improve your search experience, and Lou Rosenfeld's world-class expertise in user-centered design is the place to start."
Pete Bell, co-founder, Endeca
"Louis Rosenfeld's Search Analytics for Your Site is a superlative work from the initial story to the final chapter on bridging web analytics and UX practice. I'm somewhat experienced with event logging methods, but Louis' book opened my mind to new ways to use analytics. Each chapter is packed with useful information, clear examples, and refreshing caveats that could only come from a master of search analytics. The book is written in an engaging style that makes you feel like Louis is with you on every page. I plan to apply some of the knowledge and techniques immediately. Great book!"
Chauncey Wilson, Senior Manager, User Research
"If we all agree that user feedback will improve any site's user experience, why aren't we spending more time with the actual words our audience uses when asking us for stuff? I can't imagine a more experienced guide than Lou Rosenfeld to help us put this amazing data to work."
Jeffrey Veen, Founder & CEO, Typekit
"Lou is the perfect author to tackle what is essentially unexplored territory in the UX community. With Search Analytics for your Site, he has uncovered a huge goldmine for UX professionals of all stripes: now we have the tools to finally, finally fix our website and intranet search experiences. This is one of those rare books that makes me pound the table with my fist and yell, 'Yes! Exactly! Awesome!' while I'm reading it."
Kristina Halvorson, CEO, Brain Traffic, and author, Content Strategy for the Web
About the Author
Lou Rosenfeld wears two hats.
As an information architecture consultant, he helps Fortune 500s and other large, highly political organizations make their messy information easier to find. His past clients include PayPal, Caterpillar, Ford, The Centers for Disease Control, SIGGRAPH, AT&T, and Borders. With Peter Morville, Lou is co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web (O'Reilly & Associates; 3rd edition, 2006) regarded as the bible of information architecture, and has been a regular contributor to Web Review, Internet World, and CIO magazines. He is co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute and UXnet, the User Experience Network. Lou blogs at louisrosenfeld.com.
As a publisher, Lou founded Rosenfeld Media, so that there would be at least one publishing house dedicated to serving the needs of the growing community of user experience practitioners. In its short life, the company has published such seminal titles as Luke Wroblewski's Web Form Design and Storytelling for User Experience by Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks. Lou's book is the eighth title that Rosenfeld Media has published, and about a dozen more should be available by 2013.
Lou holds a Masters in Information and Library Studies and a B.A. in History, both from the University of Michigan.
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Customer Reviews
Even doing the very basics that are recommended in the book have incredible results.
In just the past few days, I have been able make improvements to the top 20% of the searches performed on our new website to date. Taking the statistics pointed out in the book, this has improved user experience by 8%! Not bad for a bit of analysis and tweaking website content and metadata.
The book goes into a lot of detail on improving on site search results. So if you already have these available and haven't a clue what to make of them...then you have found your bible! No more decisions based on who shouts loudest, hunches or a finger in the air! You know....real smart ways of building sites and site navigation.
I have loads more to do as result of what I have read so far - I know that. But this is a brilliant start. I'll be building this into my plans for 2012 as I fully appeciate you cannot just do this one day and forget about it for 6 months!
Onwards and upwards.
Alan
Section 1 introduces the basic principles of site analytics, Section 2 covers how to analyse the data, and Section 3 is about how to use the analysis to build better sites. In all there are eleven chapters. Section 2 is the heart of the book, with chapters covering pattern analysis, failure analysis, session analysis, audience analysis and finally goal-based analysis. One of my favourites is Practical Tips for Improving Content, as so often a poor user experience is not related to a design flaw but content that the site visitor is not able to either understand or trust. Section 4, entitled Coda, just has a single chapter on bridging web analytics and user experience. Although many of the examples are from web sites the basic principles are just as relevant to intranets.
The writing style is immensely readable and the design and production of the book are flawless. The book is illustrated with a number of case studies, and at the end of each chapter is a short but carefully written summary. As with all Rosenfeld Media books the book has an associated web site.
What I missed in this book is any guidance on the make-up of a search analytics team. Log analysis needs to be carried out by people with the right skill sets, and most probably they are information professionals with a library or information science background. An understanding of the business, especially with an intranet, is also very important. It would have been helpful to have a section that a site manager could place in front of their manager to make the business case for making search analytics even just part of someone's daily work.
Overall this book is a sort of 21st Century Rosetta Stone, as it enables the cryptic language of search logs to be decoded into something that gives invaluable insights into the meaning of the numbers. It is a book that no web site or intranet site owner should be without if they really want to get the best from their organisation's investment in web/intranet technology and content. Sadly the evidence from many surveys is that search satisfaction is decreasing, probably because the extent to which organisations invest in a search support team is minimal. Hopefully this book, which exudes Lou's commitment and enthusiasm for the cause, may make a difference.
Why? Not because it isn't helpful. On the contrary, it's exactly the book I need -- in fact, the book my whole team needs -- right now.
Not because it's hard to read. Lou Rosenfeld writes clearly and the book is formatted to be highly readable. I've almost come to take those features for granted in books from Rosenfeld Media, but it's always a pleasure to find both plain language and a format that is considerate to the reader in books that I have to read for work.
Not because I already know all this stuff. I can't wait to get to Chapters 5 through 10 and all they can tell me about making the best use of Google Analytics. The people who use our website will appreciate it deeply if I do.
If you've looked at the table of contents, you might notice that I didn't say anything about reading Chapter 11. That's because, cued by the most helpful section, "How to Use This Book," which immediately follows the dedication, I skipped ahead and read Chapter 11 first. The advice given there is tailored to your own situation. So, because your needs and background are not the same as mine, you might follow a different approach.
In a nutshell, my needs are that we're trying to get support for using Google Analytics to drive targeted usability testing on our website. More on that later. But the point is that I need to learn as much about Google Analytics and the tools it will give us for improving our website so my boss can make the pitch to folks higher on the management chain.
Let me make that point clear: We don't yet have Google Analytics working on our site. We're trying to get permission to do so. I started reading SAYS for background information.
I've stopped because, after a brief and highly effective introduction to the basics of site search analytics, Lou has told me in Chapters 2 through 4 how to use information we already have -- the data in our website's search logs. (Every website has search logs. I've seen periodic reports from ours, but I could never make sense of how the data were presented. Maybe you're in the same boat.)
It turns out that a lot of the information I had been told we couldn't get is right there in our search logs, waiting to be coaxed to the surface. So that, plus a meeting with my team, is my task for the day.
Maybe you're in the same boat -- you either can't get one of the fancier analytics packages added to your site, or you can't get it done right now. Even so, this book will be useful to you.
Maybe, unlike me, you still run from any math that is more complicated than single-column addition. This book gives you links to spreadsheets that do all the math for you. It also walks you through examples of using the spreadsheets to mine the data. So if you've never even used Excel, never fear. All you have to do is follow the instructions to import data from your search logs and then follow the tips about what to look for.
Maybe you would like more help as you work this out. Besides the fact that this book itself is an easy-to-use desk reference, Rosenfeld has included a number of sidebars by other site-search analytics experts. Each sidebar has two purposes: first, to introduce a useful technique or helpful perspective; second, through a link to the respective expert's blog or website, to introduce the reader to an entire online community they can draw on to continue improving their SSA skills. Each sidebar does both well.
Looking ahead to the parts I haven't read, I see the same features there. If I get asked about a topic covered there, I can use the table of contents to quickly find the section that will answer that question. Readable as Rosenfeld's writing is, I am confident I will have the correct answer quickly.
As you'll learn if you read this book, SSA is not a one-time thing. It's a process, and it works best if you devote at least a few minutes a week to doing it well. That means not to read the standard reports your IT group probably issues, but to use the techniques described in this book to find informative patterns in the data itself.
So, when I am done, I will keep this modest volume at my (virtual) side, where I can quickly review it whenever a chance to analyze our site-visit statistics arises. If you are at all involved in keeping your website usable, you should do the same.
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