Posted by David Markle, Director of Retail Experience, Hayneedle

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is David Markle, Director of Retail Experience for Hayneedle, an online retailer of home furnishings. See what other organizations that use Google Search Appliance have to say.

Hayneedle.com offers millions of home products, requiring a robust shopping experience to help customers discover exactly what they're looking for. The name "hayneedle" contains the seed of a promise – a perfect find for each customer's unique needs and tastes. To that end, Hayneedle has embarked on a process of continuous improvement of our site's discovery tools, including the addition of a much better search solution, powered by Google Search Appliance.

Our previous search solutions couldn't handle the large amount of content indexing and diversity of search queries that hayneedle.com customers entered. Performance lagged, and the search results weren't highly relevant. Our customers demanded better, and we set out to fix the situation.

We considered every possible search provider in the market, grading them on a list of more than 100 features with a focus on performance and search relevancy. We evaluated each for its potential to provide us a scalable solution that could grow with our business. Google Search Appliance emerged as the leader in the areas that mattered most to our customers and clearly offered the best return on investment.

Since we began using Google Search, hayneedle.com has seen revenue per search increase by more than 20%. In addition, the conversion rate for shoppers who use search has increased by 12%, and the average order value for shoppers who use search has gone up 5%. Google is the perfect partner as we seek to continually improve our retail search solution and help our customers find the perfect products for their home.

Posted by Yakup Dogan, Assistant General Manager for Alternative Distribution Channels, Yapı Kredi

Editor's note: Today’s guest blogger is Yakup Dogan, Assistant General Manager in charge of Alternative Distribution Channels at Yapı Kredi, one of the largest retail banks and the largest credit card issuing bank in Turkey. View their case study to learn more and see what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

For me, one of the best things about working at Yapi Kredi is the genuine desire to make the banking experience as simple and enjoyable as possible for our customers. With this in mind, my team and I recently undertook a major re-design project to help improve the customer experience for the three million unique monthly visitors to our website.

And it was a big re-design. We literally got rid of everything on the site apart from a search bar. No confusing menus. No clutter. Visitors to the site can type what they need into the search bar and get directed straight to the answer. It is easy to use and we have had fantastic feedback from our customers. Not only has the number of daily site searches increased by 1000%, but users are spending an extra 30 seconds on average on the site.

Most importantly of all, the shift to the new site has made a genuine business impact. We’ve seen a 134% increase in loan applications since we re-designed the site and I attribute this to how easy it is to navigate around and use the site.



It’s safe to say we couldn’t have done any of this without the GSA. It offered advanced relevancy, ease of use, familiarity and lower TCO. Data security is very important to us and the GSA’s ability to integrate all of the domain’s security features was crucial.

Despite the enormous growth in use of the site, thanks to the GSA the number of admin staff I need to allocate to search remains the same. And because the volume of searches is now so much higher, we can better understand what customers need and are looking for the most. This, combined with web analytics, opens up a high level of insight into our customer’s expectations, frustrations and needs.

This enhanced visibility also enables us to better target our promotion of products to the right people at the right time during their visit, and increase sales. I firmly believe we’ve set a new standard for a simple, effective website experience in the financial sector.

- Over 93% of Calgarians use the Internet.
- Only 18% of traffic came directly to our home page - 55% of people came from search engines, primarily Google.
- Citizens want to interact with us online, instead of spending time on the phone or in-person - 60% noted better convenience, such as not having to drive to a city facility. Others noted speed and 24/7 availability.
- More than 40% of Calgary citizens said they wanted more services online.

Our public-facing web presence, which has 16,000 pages of content, across 28 business units, with a wide variety of applications, functionality, documents and information for our citizens, handled 9 million visits in 2010. The major drawback was that the information was difficult to find.

Forty-seven percent of Calgary citizens surveyed reported that the incumbent search engine on Calgary.ca did not work well. It required knowledge of city acronyms and terminology, something many citizens, understandably, don’t possess. Our content and our site was cluttered, out-of-date, and difficult to weed through. We struggled with maintenance as individual business units continued to add to our already packed site.

In response, we formed the Web Leadership and Renewal Program in 2007. Among the chief goals was to provide citizens with easy-to-use search and better access to city programs and services. This led us to create an entirely new, search-centric site which was first concepted and tested in November 2009, and finally launched today.

The Google Search Appliance (GSA) is the cornerstone of this new site and our efforts to improve access to services and programs and increase government efficiency. It is linked to a content management system, ESRI for interactive mapping, and to websites such as calgarymayor.ca to provide a holistic, integrated search experience.

Now, citizens can search for everything from YouTube videos on saving water to animal services and permit information, and they can easily serve themselves by finding answers to everyday questions. Calgary.ca is just as easy and effective as searching on Google.com. The search-based concept lets Calgarians type in common keywords or phrases to find what they need, without specific knowledge of city acronyms or terminology.

We can conserve phone and in-person resources for more complex requests and apply valuable government resources more strategically. Citizens benefit from the convenience of finding most of what they need online. They can avoid unnecessary driving and parking fees and have 24/7 access.

Certain search features of the GSA were very important to us. Topping the list were best bets, synonyms, and spelling correction. Related searches and content rating were also vital, as well as the ability to easily promote the relevance of a search result based on its popularity. The Google Search Appliance provided all of these capabilities, plus it had a reputation for being very easy to install and maintain.

Citizens are rapidly adopting search now. Early metrics show that only 4% of visits to the old calgary.ca used the internal search engine. In comparison, 65% of visitors to the new calgary.ca used the the GSA, and the search results page is the second most visited page after the home page.

Ultimately, our job is to provide city services as efficiently as possible. We strive to do more with less. By making the right content easy to retrieve, citizens get the convenience they seek—and we can reduce unnecessary overhead and increase the value and variety of our services and programs.

Since its founding in 1881 by visionary relief coordinator Clara Barton, the American Red Cross has been the nation's premier non-profit emergency response organization. Today, in addition to domestic disaster relief, the American Red Cross offers compassionate services, from help for the needy to educational programs.

One of our first and most important observations was that returning zero results for a search query is one of the fastest ways to frustrate visitors – and lose potential customers. Shoppers who have made it to your site and searched for a product or category have expressed clear interest in buying from you, and returning no results is akin to accidentally forgetting to turn around the "Closed" sign on your storefront door in the morning!

Fortunately, retailers do have tools available to avoid this pitfall: automatic stemming, spell-checker, and synonym dictionaries can help ensure that customers find related or similar products on your site, even if they don't type in the exact product name or description text.

Like Google.com, Google Commerce Search has always arrived "out of the box" with the best automatic stemming, spelling, and synonym technology available. Starting today, it's become even easier for retailers with unusual or distinct product catalogs to upload and manage custom synonym dictionaries.

We hope you'll join us on our quest to end unnecessary zero result queries!

We'll have a few fun Google schwag giveaways too, so we hope that you'll join us. All conference registrants are welcome and no additional sign-up is needed.

Hope to see you next week in the Big Apple!

Posted by Anna Bishop, Google Enterprise Search team