The Olympic mindset

With the Winter Olympics in full swing and over 2,950 athletes representing 92 countries in PyeongChang, we decided to take a look at how many countries around the world are home to Swiftype customers.

Going gold at 17

But before we dive into this, we wanted to give a shout out to Red Gerard, the 17 year old American, who took home gold in men’s snowboarding slopestyle. Incredible…here’s to more excitement over the next two weeks.

Swiftype customers around the world

Ok, now back to the business of search. Swiftype is currently powering search in over 35 countries with customers on every continent but Antartica. The US is home to the greatest number of our customers followed by the UK and Canada.

Swiftype is currently powering search in over 35 countries with customers on every continent but Antartica.

Our customers range from large multinational corporations to governments to small businesses trying to amp up their digital presence. Swiftype has become the trusted site search solution for a wide variety of organizations across the world (including BMW, Lyft, AT&T, and Samsung) and while we’re proud of the success we’ve had, our work is not over. In so many ways, we, along with our parent company Elastic, are just getting started.

Ricera. Busca. Recherche. Suche. Khoj. Zoeken. Search.

Get started with Swiftype Site Search

Level up your site search with Swiftype’s seamless content ingestion, best-in-class relevancy algorithm, and intuitive admin dashboard. Get started with your 14-day free trial.

The following is a Q&A with Mapbox’s Rafa Gutierrez about his experience working with Swiftype Site Search.

About Mapbox

If you’re not already familiar with Mapbox, they are a location data platform for mobile and web applications. They provide building blocks for developers to add location features like maps, search, and navigation into any experience they create. Mapbox’s strong customer portfolio includes The Weather Channel, Tableau, General Electric, and National Geographic. Together, Mapbox’s customers are shaping the way 300 million people explore the world.

Mapbox + Swiftype

Mapbox has been a Swiftype customer for a number of years now, and they use our search technology in a few different places on their website. Mapbox’s core use case for Swiftype is in their help center where they leverage our search technology to give their customers easy access to the documentation that’s relevant to their needs.

Recently, we spoke with Rafa Gutierrez, a Support Engineer at Mapbox, about his experience with Swiftype. During our conversation, Rafa touched on his use of Swiftype’s customizable web crawler, powerful search analytics and synonyms feature. Here’s our full conversation.

Question and Answer with Mapbox’s Rafa Gutierrez

Q: How does Swiftype compare to your previous search solution? What benefits have you experienced since implementing Swiftype?

A: Before we started using Swiftype, we had to build in specific page filtering for each API documentation page. This was cumbersome and we knew it wouldn’t scale for additional SDKs and other frameworks that we’d eventually have come online. We also needed a way for the search to cover the entirety of our site while still having some selective control over what it crawled. With Swiftype, we could just add a code snippet to all the areas of our site we needed covered by search.

We use Swiftype throughout the site but its main customization has been for our help and support pages. Swiftype crawls our pages selectively for content and pulls various categories and tags for filtering. We’re able to blacklist portions of our site to keep things relevant. We also have the ability to tailor content to the specific user and weigh out specific terms to differentiate content on similar searches.

Q: Tell us about the types of users that visit your website regularly.  What are they looking for? How are you creating experiences that are tailored to their unique needs?

A: We’re a developer platform and our customers range from government organizations to autonomous vehicle manufacturers to on-demand transportation companies. Whether it’s finding a coffee spot on Foursquare or building navigation systems for autonomous cars – Mapbox does the geo stuff so developers can focus on building their product.

As we look to meet the needs of our wide array of users, we want ensure a streamlined and tailored experience that gives users fast access to relevant documentation so they can make the most of their use of Mapbox technology. Swiftype helps us deliver relevant content so our customers can find what they’re looking for faster.

 

Swiftype helps us deliver relevant content so our customers can find what they’re looking for faster.

Rafa Gutierrez
Support Engineer

 

Q: In what ways have you utilized the data from the Swiftype Search Analytics dashboard? What is your search data telling you about how users engage with your help center and product?

A: We dive into our metrics dashboard regularly to look for oddities or patterns that give us insight to how customers are finding the info they need. When customers search for terms that we’re not listing in our glossary or used for keywords in our categories, we can find these and add them to synonyms. For instance, we found a number of customers that would search for the phrase “add marker to map”. There are a few ways to do this with our tools so we restructured our docs to surface ones relevant to getting started with creating markers on a map. We also added synonyms to Swiftype to capture words that often get conflated with markers on a map like “pins” or “points”.

 

Q: How are you using the combination of search and quick glance features to drive down customer service requests?

A: We use Jekyll for a static HTML site generator so we can load up all relevant keywords, categories, and excerpts as metadata for our all of our help docs. By doing this, our search can pull this info into the quick glance as customers type in their search terms. At glance, they can see which category their term falls into and read brief excerpts before they click through. This was really valuable for us in that we could apply design treatments to results and watch search results get clicked through more than 50% of the time, reduced our searches with no clickthroughs by 16%, and nearly eliminated results with multiple clicks.

We also used the search in our contact form to provide an extra layer of assistance to ensure our customers didn’t overlook a doc before contacting us. We’re continuing to iterate on this approach for our next release.

Located in Melbourne, Florida, National Drug Screening (NDS) helps employers reduce liability, improve safety, and attract and retain better employees by providing a broad range of drug testing services and training. The company’s leadership built NDS into one of the leading sources on drug testing information, and much of that knowledge forms the basis of their extensive and information-filled website.

But after years of using Google Site Search to help their customers tap into this knowledge, they saw its demise as a potential roadblock to their continued online success. After struggling through a short-lived customized site search, they knew they needed a packaged solution that would not only outshine Google Site Search, but would be easy to buy, implement, and manage.

Here, Joe Riley, President of National Drug Screening, shares his experience of how site search is critical to his business, and how Swiftype turned a potential sales nightmare into an opportunity to elevate NDS’s already stellar reputation.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

When we heard that Google Site Search was being discontinued, and that the replacement, Google Custom Search Engine, would force us to show advertisements, we knew we needed to find something else. For a potential customer to search our site and see ads, well we didn’t want that at all.

Our web development vendor took a shot at building a custom site search replacement, but it just wasn’t robust enough for our needs. Our value is in our expertise and our knowledge, so we need visitors to find what they’re searching for. A good site search is a requirement for us.

So we looked around for another Google Site Search alternative. Our “must haves” were that it was as good as or better than what we had with Google, that the price was reasonable, and that it was easy for our developers to implement. We had the same criteria we had for Google Site Search.

What made Swiftype stand out as the obvious choice?

Once we found Swiftype and looked at how it worked on some [of their] customers’ websites, we didn’t look any further. It did everything we needed, Swiftype is a reputable company, and the sales team was very professional. We decided that, if we’re going to do this, this is the company we’re going to do it with.

What I was really excited about was when I went to a Swiftype customer site. I searched for something, and results came up. I searched again, but maybe this time with the terms spelled incorrectly, or words out of order, and the results came up as expected. That’s what sold me on it, and I was very happy to see how great it worked on a real site, not just in a demo.

How long was the Swiftype implementation?

Not very long. Once our web developers got started, Swiftype implementation took just a couple of days.

That short timeframe was pretty amazing, considering our website is totally custom. It’s not a WordPress site. We have our own content management system for blogs and frequently asked questions (FAQs), and we have our developers do everything custom. But once we told them we wanted Swiftype, they really had no issues at all.

Now, when a visitor clicks on our search icon, it looks just like it did before. The color scheme, the search box. Everything matches. It looks like it’s always looked, and that’s great.

Do you have plans to use Swiftype’s analytics?

We definitely do have plans to dig into Swiftype analytics, and we’re sure it’ll bring more value to our search.

Our web traffic comes from both organic search and paid ads, but our organic search results really overpower all of our competitors because our content is so strong. Our content is relevant and unique, and we want to leverage that. We want people to be able to find it. If they found our site, but the search was weak and the couldn’t sift through the great content that we have, then we’re missing a huge opportunity.

Swiftype can give us the insights to know more about what’s bringing visitors to our site, what they’re looking for, what they’re finding and reading.

Why is good site search so important for you and your customers?

We want National Drug Screening to continue to be recognized as one of the leading experts on drug testing in the United States. So when visitors come to our website, they find the information they need. We want to be their source for expert information, and obviously that then translates into sales opportunities.

Just as importantly, we also want more of our own employees to be seen as experts. We take inbound phone calls all day long, hundreds of phone calls, so our staff gets all kinds of questions. They’re well trained, but they can’t recall everything. They can, however, utilize the expertise on our website as a primary resource rather than doing a web search and maybe getting a good answer or not. Then they can talk to that prospect or customer very intelligently, and be confident that they’re sharing the most reliable information.

Using site search internally is critical, since those inbound calls are usually either an existing customer or someone looking to buy. It gives our staff a huge library of expertise right at their fingertips, and it helps turn them each individually into experts on our particular market.

What’s the primary value you’re realizing with Swiftype?

Our goal is to be able to assist customers, to be able to assist people who are looking for information, or people that are potentially new customers. We want people to know that we have great information on all things drug testing. Getting them the right answers quickly, whether on our website or on the phone, helps us grow our business, and that’s obviously very important.

Want to learn more? Our customers have great stories about how Swiftype helped them accomplish great things with more sophisticated site search. Check it out now!

Located in Hartford, the Connecticut State Library provides a variety of library, archival, public records, and other important information services for the state. Their mission includes holding digital archives from more than 70 departments and providing online access to searchable databases and digital collections.

After struggling with a generic site search tool, a new IT Analyst was charged with improving the experience for the library’s patrons. A unique challenge was that any new search solution had to combine information from not only the main website, but also from a separate, specialized platform for librarians.

Connecticut State Library IT Analyst, Jacqueline Bagwell, shares her experience of implementing Swiftype as the Library’s new site search solution:

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

As part of the improvement project, we moved to a WordPress platform for our site and used the integrated search tool. But that didn’t allow patrons to also search our subdomain, which is a separate content management platform built specifically for librarians. It was really important to include that content in our search because, otherwise, so much information would be undiscoverable by patrons.

Searching two different platforms created a unique situation for us, but it was critical to include results from both. We have information in our subdomain that isn’t available anywhere else, like death records and historical patents. That information is unique to the library, so we have to make it easily accessible.

What has surprised you the most with your deployment of Swiftype?

I think that the usage of search is so high and growing. But it’s nice that Swiftype was able to just handle it so easily. I’m looking at the big picture to make sure our resources don’t get stretched to our limits. Swiftype is able to handle search traffic that’s growing beyond our expectations.

Before Swiftype, I don’t think patrons had a good understanding of how they could get the information they wanted. And the patrons obviously like our new site search and use it. It’s being used way more than I thought it would be, and that’s a big jump from before.

What was your biggest challenge during your implementation?

It’s our volume of information across two domains and we’re adding new databases to make it more useful for the patrons. We have all the legislative information as well that comes over from the state capital that gets digitized. We have records that go back a long way, so there’s quite a lot. But we met our deadline and have been expanding ever since.

How are you using Swiftype’s analytics to improve the user experience?

We’re seeing search grow on a regular basis, which is good. Probably about three times per week, I look at reports on broken links, pages accessed, no-results searches. That last one helps me understand if the query was bad or if there was another issue with redirects or something else.

Is there a feature you can’t live without?

The fact that Swiftype can index both sites, that’s its most important aspect.

Since Swiftype’s launch in 2012, we have been dedicated to serving search to a wide variety of companies, from large scale enterprises to smaller scale businesses. We are proud and honored that we’ve been able to help so many customers quickly, easily and efficiently maximize their website (and brand) potential with our site search product. Over the years we have been constantly focused on improvements to our offerings, whether through new and updated features or through partnerships with other providers. Our customers are extremely important to us, and we are humbled and overjoyed that they continue to put their trust in Swiftype year after year.

Many have found success and left us some pretty stellar reviews on G2 Crowd, the leading platform for business solution reviews. Each month, nearly 900,000 buyers utilize G2 Crowd for unbiased user reviews to assess which products are best for their businesses. Swiftype’s reviews on G2 Crowd both reaffirm the value of our product to our customers, and allow us to improve our products to make sure each and every user is satisfied with their site search.

Check out some of our favorite reviews below! Our customers constantly tell us they love how Swiftype continuously helps their customers find exactly what they need with our ease of installation, amazing relevance, and stellar support.

 

We would like to say thank you to all of our customers. Read success stories from current Swiftype customers here.

If you also love Swiftype but haven’t gotten a chance to write a review yet, visit G2 Crowd here. 

New York University (NYU) Libraries is a global organization that advances learning, research, and scholarly inquiry in an environment dedicated to the open exchange of information. As the library of a prestigious university in the 21st Century, their proactive focus on technology enables them to actively reach users at their point of need, wherever that may be.

Today, the number one goal in NYU Libraries’ strategic plan is to “create a user experience that is high quality, consistent, and robust regardless of the user’s location, access method, or objective.” Obviously, their website serves as a critical component in reaching that goal.

As head of user experience for NYU’s library division, Nadaleen Tempelman-Kluit manages their online conduit between the university’s vast number of diverse users (from students and faculty to researchers and staff) and the massive amounts of information available. Here, Nadaleen explains their move to Swiftype as their primary site search and how it has improved their user experience.

What prompted you to look for a new site search?

Nyu.edu uses Google Site Search, so we were using that as our library’s site search. We didn’t have a lot of ability to customize the search, so we wanted to move away from that and get our own solution. We wanted to have more control.

What control did you need?

We didn’t have access to the analytics, so we didn’t know what was possible. We didn’t know all of the things we could do until we deployed Swiftype, but before we weren’t customizing anything. We wanted to gather data to improve both the search experience and how we were presenting our content to the users.

Did users notice your lack of customization?

Yes, for sure. We also had the old search kind of buried, so users had a tough time even finding it. But now our [Swiftype] search is front and center across all of our pages because now we understand our users better and recognize what they’re looking for.

How long did it take to implement Swiftype?

It was just a day. We worked with our CMS vendor, Siteleaf, and they recommended Swiftype. So we took their recommendation and it was ready to go almost immediately.

What types of analytics are helping you improve the user experience?

I tend to look at search queries, and that’s been really helpful. Swiftype’s synonym insights are also great. I can look at queries, see what people are searching for and what words they’re using, then add those keywords to our site. That’s been pretty huge.

We have a service called The Avery Fisher Center for Music and Media, where students get DVDs and watch videos, but most people spell it ‘Fischer.’ So there were a ton of people searching for Avery Fischer and not finding anything. That’s a perfect example. Another is a service called E-ZBorrow, which is spelled e-hyphen-z, but people obviously search for “e-a-s-y.” So we put in ‘E-Z’ and the synonyms ‘easy’ and ‘Easy-Borrow’ and so on. That’s been helpful, and it’s a great way to learn your audience.

Where have you seen improvements since deploying Swiftype?

Just looking at the number of searches, it’s much higher than I expected. It’s become very clear that site search is a big deal for our users.

What’s the Swiftype feature you just can’t live without?

The search queries. That sounds basic, but I’m looking for the percentage of people who succeed in finding something. As the head of user experience, that’s incredibly valuable to me. When I see queries where people didn’t find something, I want to jump in and resolve that.

Want to learn more? We have other great stories about how Swiftype has helped other organizations accomplish great things with Site Search. Check it out now!

Located northeast of Los Angeles, Azusa Pacific University (APU) is home to almost 10,000 students and counts 68 bachelor’s degrees, 45 master’s degrees, and eight doctoral programs within the system.

After years of using the Google Search Appliance for their website, the APU web team was faced with a new challenge. After Google announced it was phasing out the product, they were on the search for an even better solution—and not something so “old school.”

Here, Dustin Reynolds, Assistant Director of Digital Marketing, shares APU’s experiences of implementing and improving their search.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

At first, we didn’t really know what we were looking for—other than we wanted something that we could build into our website that looked custom and like it belonged there. We also wanted to be able to do keyword matches and pin them to the top of results. If someone types “MBA,” we need to ensure that we always serve Master of Business Administration as the very first result. Customization of search results was very important to us.

As we explored the options more, we started to see features that we really wanted. This included ease-of-use and the ability for many team members in our office to access the tool and work on refining the search options. If a team knew what should appear and they could then do it themselves without having to pass it to a developer, then it would make the process much more efficient within the office.

What was the actual Swiftype implementation like?

It was actually very fast—around two weeks. In that time, we figured out customization and fallback pages. We then went on to really delve into weighting, as well as creating some custom meta tags on our site to help the search engine figure out things we knew the user would be looking to find.

What has surprised you the most with your new deployment?

One of the biggest surprises was cost. Swiftype is quite a bit less than Google Search Appliance and for the tool that you’re getting.

What do you see as the biggest difference between Google Search Appliance and Swiftype?

Outside of cost, it’s having the ability to change things quickly, weight terms differently, and customize how we rank certain sections of our site. This is a big deal for us because we feel like we’re providing better quality service to the user now.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

Our main goal is to get potential students to fill out a form and say they want more information on a program. Now we really have a window into what’s happening—whether it’s misspelling of search terms or a way to try and understand why they didn’t click on a certain search result. As far as conversions go, we set up one conversion variable, which for us is the Information Request Form.

Is there a feature you can’t live without?

I would say it’s the results ranking because we have such a robust site and anything can show up for a search term. Being able to control it and know that the first three or four options are on target is key. You’d be surprised—especially when people are searching on mobile— the amount of times a letter is skipped or doubled up. Now we can look and say, “Oh, clearly they were trying to type ‘admissions’ or ‘accreditation'” and account for that. It’s a big deal when we can make sure we’re serving up the content our audience is trying to find—even with terms that are often misspelled.

On the Search: Elaine Shannon Web Developer & User Interface Specialist

What kind of challenges with search did you face before Swiftype?

One of the biggest challenges we hoped to solve with a new search tool was the ability to search across multiple domains. Over the years we have created many websites, both internal and public-facing, and there was no good way to search across them. It seems like an easy problem to solve, but on our main platform, we didn’t have a tool that could handle results from more than one website.

We also had a hard time making sure search results were relevant. As soon as we installed Swiftype, we started spending time customizing results. Users don’t need to sift through the thousands of pages and documents we’ve indexed across all these sites, they just need the top handful of results.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

The most important factor for us was building a search engine that spanned multiple websites on multiple domains. We also wanted to be able to have better control over search results. We can’t always change our content to match searchers’ intentions — for example, we don’t call our residence halls “dorms” — so being able to set up synonyms and custom result sets at an affordable price point sold us on Swiftype.

In what creative ways have you used Swiftype to improve your search?

Students don’t always know what major they want to pursue, so it’s not always easy for them to browse through a university website and find a program they want to commit to. We thought it might make it easier to decide if we set up a list of interests and linked those to related programs. So, we built a dedicated search tool. If you’re interested in art, you can type that in and be presented with five different program options that match that interest.

Our program page used to be a long list of everything we offered, and we found that site visitors didn’t stay on that page very long. Now, we offer a combination of options — you can search by interest, or you can filter through programs by degree or by school, and we’ve found that 34% of visitors are now using the Search by Interest tool and immediately finding what they’re looking for.

How are you making ongoing adjustments to your relevancy model?

I check on the dashboard weekly, even if it is just a quick glance. If there is anything glaring, like a popular search that’s not returning any results, or a search result set that’s not getting any clicks, we’ll quickly update those results. Otherwise I try to make a focused effort once a quarter to go through our data more deeply and customize our results to provide a better visitor experience.

We also build out content as needed for empty search results. A fun example of this is we didn’t have anything on our mascot for a while, so that was an easy one to add.

What kind of success have you seen since improving your search with Swiftype?

Search is one of the most popular ways to navigate our website. We’ve heard a lot of positive feedback on both our main engine (which searches cross-domain, so you can find the main site, the law school, the bookstore, and the intranet all in one engine) and our Search by Interest engine.

For us, the gold standard of conversion is when a visitor applies for admission, but prospective students are a long sales cycle and visit our sites multiple times before they take that step. We know that registering for a campus visit is a high indicator of a user’s likelihood to apply, and we can track those metrics and how site search has impacted them to date.

Like any tool, there was a bit of a learning curve when we first set up Swiftype. We had to learn which factors impacted the search results most — whether it be a headline, title, or page content. Now that we’ve had more than a year to tweak results, we’ve found a good balance and are serving our visitors more relevant results, which keeps them on the site longer.

On the Search: Michael Santoroski, Director of Web and Software Development

Roanoke College was ranked 2nd on the 2014 U.S. News and World Report list of Up-and-Coming National Liberal Arts Colleges. As the Director of Web and Software Development, Michael Santoroski was tasked with improving the college’s site functionality, after a site redesign. The initial search solution was not returning the desired results and with so much on the line after a complete site overhaul, search was critical to help visitors find their way around a newly designed website.

Today we discussed the ease of implementing Swiftype and the biggest impact it has had on both their internal and public-facing sites.

What kind of challenges with search did you face before Swiftype?

Roanoke is a small college with about 2,000 students.  Like many colleges, we don’t have the resources to have the latest technology, but we needed to improve our on-site search experience because our site serves such a wide range of audiences. From prospective students, current students, faculty, and alumni – search is often the fastest way for them to find answers to their questions.

We were using Google’s Custom Search Engine, but it was no longer meeting our needs. The tool wasn’t flexible enough for our site and wasn’t producing the results we expected.

What were your “must-haves” for search during your evaluation?

Two things were really critical for us. Weighted search and being able to rank search results was key for us. Secondly, the type-ahead feature was really important to me. It just made searching so much better when Google first implemented it for the web.

With a limited IT team, I was also looking for a solution that would be easy to implement. I like that it’s a crawler-based solution. I just had to add our domain and set up probably took less than an hour to get it to a functioning state. Swiftype has really made installation as unobtrusive as possible.

What has surprised you the most with your new deployment?

The number of emails to our web support has been reduced to almost none. We were constantly getting emails through our contact page from users who couldn’t find content they were looking for, whether that be an upcoming course schedule or an event. As soon as we implemented Swiftype, the emails stopped…virtually overnight.

What new things did you find readers searching?

We had one instance where a faculty member told me she couldn’t find the academic catalog. I was in a meeting, so I went in and switched the search results around a little bit, but then she emailed me two days later and said “Oh, I found my problem, I was spelling it like British catalogue – with “gue”. So I just added that as a synonym and it’s fixed either way now.

That kind of on the fly customization really helps us keep our site search results relevant.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

For higher education, it’s a little harder to quantify our success metrics in relation to site-search. It is all about ease of use. Swiftype does have an engagement module for that, but I haven’t really gotten to play with those. What we end up seeing in the admissions process is that a student comes back to the site over multiple sessions, and when they come to the site, each time they have a different objective.

On the flip side, you also have alumni who receive emails, come to the site looking for alumni events and rely on search. Ultimately those are visitors you want making donations to the college, so each type of visitor has different success metrics.

Higher Ed websites are difficult. The administration wants all kinds of content on the site, but students want something else, so there is a balance in terms of what information to show.

I think in a way, search has solved that problem. It’s one of those things that works great and I don’t worry about it too much. It just does exactly what I need it to do and doesn’t make me spend a lot of time fighting with it. When I’m in a meeting and someone says “I tried to search for this thing and I didn’t find it”, I can just go in there and easily make it happen. Make that be the top search result and it’s super easy to do, even I can’t screw it up.

Search has changed the way our customers do business, and we are on a mission to communicate the value of it. “On the Search” is a new series to help uncover the good, bad, and ugly of what many companies face with search today–and how Swiftype can help.

On the Search:  Travis Clark, EO Media Group

Travis Clark was in a search bind.

As the digital development manager for EO Media Group, Clark needed to improve their search results—and fast. With only three weeks before launching a new ad marketplace platform, he was on the brink.

Here, he discusses the challenges and ultimate success of moving from a “black hole” to new business and revenue opportunities. And it’s all thanks to a transformation through search.

What kind of challenges with search did you face?

We are a small publishing company with 11 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest. We built some things with newspaper vendors and used WordPress, but the search for both was awful. Plugins didn’t work very well for us either.

I worked on building a new ad marketplace that is now running on the Capital Press site. We were looking to hit hundreds of thousands of searchable bits of content, and nothing we tried could handle that for us. It was very frustrating.

As a small team, we couldn’t say, “Okay, let’s throw a bunch of money at a developer to build something from scratch.” I wasn’t sure what we were going to do. Then Swiftype was recommended to us to check out.

What was your “must-have” for search in your new ad marketplaces?

Speed was definitely key. When we found Swiftype, we were able to implement it in just a couple weeks and right before our launch. And it had all the power we had been looking for.

It was also a priority to finally be able to do facet searches. The faceting part is super important because we really need to be able to drill down through the content. Now that we have Swiftype we can’t live without the results ranking. We literally need that to do our business.

What has been most surprising with your new deployment?

Before we pretty much had a black hole. We could track users, page views, and all the normal Google analytics. But we didn’t have any idea what people were actually searching for.

Case in point is our Capital Press site, which is an agriculture publication. We thought we knew the customers for it, but this changed once we started receiving the metrics on search queries from Swiftype.

There are parts of our audience we never knew existed. Now we can take these metrics to new advertisers who wouldn’t think we are a fit for them. Or, on the flipside, go back to old customers with new pitches and the numbers to back it up. We’re so happy with what we have now.

What new things did you find readers searching?

A couple surprising search terms were “Christmas trees” and “livestock.”

Christmas trees as a term starts popping up in the summer and tapers off after Christmas obviously. We didn’t know anyone was looking to our agriculture publication to buy and price the market online.

Our print publication had always sold to the livestock business. But there are also a lot of searches on livestock online, which we didn’t realize. This is a great example of a wide, open market because most of our advertisers for the digital site are not in that industry. We can now outreach to those businesses in our region and show them a market they haven’t hit yet.

What kind of success have you seen since launching the improved search with Swiftype?

Most telling is that ad revenue has increased 145% since implementing Swiftype. We’ve also seen some really incredible results with an increase in users (43%), sessions (17%) and new (46%) and returning (31%) users. This tells me that the new platform is attracting more people and more often.

The ability to refine the platform and begin seeing classified advertising more like a retail business has been very exciting. We believe powerful search has streamlined our user experience.

We have some really great stories from our customers, too. One has a tractor rental business and, after three months, he had to pull his listings because the booking was so far out. He switched it to used parts he sells and had to pull that because he got low on inventory. It’s pretty amazing.