When we talk about enterprise search, you have hundreds of users using your enterprise search software every day. The search logs of all these searches can hold quite a lot of valuable information about your users, their priority, what they are looking for, and more. A detailed analysis of the search logs can also provide you information about your search performance i.e. whether your enterprise search software is living up to your user's expectations. In other words, the search logs can tell your how happy your users are with their search experience. Search analytics is the tool that you need to analyze the search logs to derive the business insights you're looking for.

To cater to the needs of enterprises to analyze the search logs and derive information from it, IT solutions providers have developed advanced enterprise search platforms. 3RDi Search is an example of such a platform which offers every text mining capability one might require for analyzing the most complex unstructured data. Search analytics forms one of the key functionalities offered by the platform, through its Retina API.

Significance of Search Analytics

Search analytics is a text analysis technology that allows enterprises to understand user behavior. Why do users do what they do? What are the most searched for queries? What form of results are they mostly looking for? Which are the most searched for terms? To find answers to these questions, it is important for the algorithms of the enterprise search engines to enter deep into the minds of the user. For this, the search engine needs insights and not so surprisingly, these insights are hidden within the search logs – waiting to be discovered! Search analytics, therefore, the key to understanding user behavior and making the best use of it to derive business insights that help your business create an improved user experience and strive towards building a base of happy users.

How Search Analytics Can Benefit your Business

Now, we shall have a closer look at how exactly your business can benefit from the implementation of search analytics through advanced text mining engines like Retina API and why it is one of the primary text analysis capabilities you should look for. Precisely, there are two primary benefits:

1] Increased Relevancy of Search Results

One of the biggest advantages of search analytics is the improvement in the search relevancy that it brings. The relevancy of search results is one of the biggest factors that affect how happy your users are with your enterprise search platform. Other factors including the time taken for fetching results holds true only if the results are relevant and meet the requirements of the user.

For example, if your enterprise search software shows up little relevant results when users type in ‘software program’, it could be that your search engine is not taking into consideration results that include similar terms like ‘software application’ or ‘application’, etc. If this is the case, you need to tweak the semantic search algorithms to take synonyms into consideration when presenting the results.

2] Easy Access to Key Business Insights

So, we have already learnt how search analytics can help you derive business insights from search logs. These insights are what you need to help you make important business decisions. In other words, an enterprise search platform like 3RDi Search that is powered by an advanced text mining engine like Retina API, is what you need to gain the business insights that can power strategic decisions to fuel business growth.

For example, if you own an ecommerce business, analyzing your search logs might help you learn about the products that your users are looking for, yet they are not available on your portal or have been out of stock for long. Armed with this information, you can build a plan that revolves around those products, or others that cater to similar requirements, in order to increase purchase rates and make your business grow.

In addition to the benefits mentioned above, here are some other benefits that search analytics can bring to your business:

• Identification of the most common mistakes users make when typing the most frequently used queries, so that the search engine can be trained to rectify the errors automatically and show the relevant results.
• Improved visibility into the most frequently searched for queries, as well as the ones that have the lowest performance.
• Understanding of how your users make use of filters and improving the search path accordingly to make the search process faster and more accurate.
• Availability of information on the results that your users find the most relevant based on the results with the highest click rates.
• Access to information on the results that bring in the most conversions (if it's an ecommerce website) so that you can make necessary changes to prevent abandoning users.

The Future Holds Unlimited Possibilities

Search analytics is a relatively new concept of text analysis that still has a long way to go. The future holds immense possibilities, as the technology holds the key to unlocking what's in the mind of the users. As the technology reaches new heights, there will be a lot more to learn, that we probably can’t even perceive right now.