Overview
The ExpertVoice global search engine’s job is to find the brands, products, or members the user is looking for by matching their search keywords and phrases with relevant brands, products, lessons or members on ExpertVoice. As with all user experiences, audience targeting plays a crucial role in what search results each user sees.
When a user begins typing a keyword or phrase in the built-in search engine on ExpertVoice, users will see a dropdown list of suggested search terms before they submit:
- Recent searches
- Brand names
- Product names
- Lesson names (web browser only)
- Common search terms
- Member names
After completing a search, brand, product and lesson results will surface for the user on the All tab. Brands will appear on the Brands tab, products on the Products tab, lessons on the Lessons tab (web browser only), and members will surface for the user on the Experts tab.
Brand results
Brands featured in the Brand results at the top of the search results page will feature all brands relevant to the user's search phrases. When a user's search has a strong match for a specific brand name, that brand will be highlighted as a top result. In addition, the following criteria will impact what brands populate in the results:
- Brand search optimization tags (generated by ExpertVoice’s machine learning algorithm)
- Partial tokens of brand name (to assist with incomplete matches and misspellings)
- Brand search phrases (can be edited by the brand in the Advocacy Platform)
Brand sorting
The logos that appear in the brand search results are first grouped based on the brand's status (whether they are active on ExpertVoice) and the audience's targeting access. The brand results are ordered based on relevance within each of those groups and prioritized by:
- Targeted brands
- Untargeted brands
- Inactive brands
Brand ranking
To improve your ranking on the brand's results page and help users discover your brand, ensure your brand has relevant search phrases. A brand's search phrases must be optimized for the search terms for which a brand wishes to appear. These phrases are critical for making sure a brand is returned in the search results for searches related to that brand, such as the activities they support ("camping," "hunting," "running," etc.) or products they sell ("backpacks," "shoes," etc.). Learn more about search phrases here.
Note: Inputting search phrases only impacts if your brand appears on the Brand results page; your search phrases do not impact the Product results page. The design functions this way because many words can be entered in those search phrases, including competitor brand names. While there is a Brand Code of Conduct, manipulating the product search results in this manner would be a frustrating experience both for the user and the brand.
Product results
Product search results will include only products for which a user has been targeted through an active hosted store or an active redirect store with a product catalog. This means that product search results may differ from user to user based on each user’s access. Learn more about audience targeting here. The product search primarily uses the information from the product catalog to find products that match the user’s search term.
Tip: Experts can further refine their search results with product characteristic data provided by the brand, such as product taxonomy, product traits (gender, activity), product collections and sub-brands.
The search engine looks for product results with specific product data fields. It searches all of the words in a user’s search phrase and looks for a match to most of those words in the data belonging to each product, including:
- Product data from the brand’s product catalog
- Name, description and technical specifications
- Product taxonomy and gender
- Brand name
- Brand’s custom collections and sub-brands
Tip: Searches are performed against synonyms for words. This means that if the product name is “sunglasses” and the search term is “glasses,” the search is likely to find the product. It does support stemming, so searching for “pants” will match products with the term “pant.”
Product sorting
Product search primarily sorts by relevance because the primary goal is to present the products most relevant to the user's search phrases. When relevance is equal, additional fields are used as tie-breakers to showcase the highest-rated products:
- The highest average quality score for a brand's product reviews
- The total quantity of product reviews
This tie-breaking functionality is particularly valuable in showcasing a brand's highest-rated products when searching against a brand name.
Product ranking
You can improve products returning for desired keywords by updating your brand's product catalog to include the desired keywords in the product name and/or catalog fields listed above. That will allow the ExpertVoice product search engine to find them and list specific search keywords on the product catalog. The ExpertVoice Commerce team will help manage your product data to ensure products are found in users' search results with these keywords. The ratio of the desired keywords to other words in the fields does influence the relevance ranking.
Tip: Reference the Search Term Frequency report in Analytics to see how experts discover your brand and products on ExpertVoice. Then, reach out to your Customer Success partner if you would like to edit your product names to match the most commonly searched terms.
Member results
You can search for, find and follow fellow members on the platform using the search engine on ExpertVoice. In the search engine, enter a member's first and/or last name and click the Experts tab to see all members associated with that name.
If you'd like, you can click on members' profiles to learn about them, read any product recommendations they've shared, and view their accomplishments and experiences.
You can also follow them to keep up with their recommendations and experiences shared on the Experts tab.
Note: Experts have the option to have a public or private profile. Private profile pages are still publicly accessible but only show limited information. If the expert has a private profile, there will not be a “follow” button on their profile. You can only follow experts who have a public profile.
Member filtering
To further refine your search results, you can filter by the members' state of residence to only show members in that location.
Lesson results
Note: As of 11-29-2022, lessons are only visible in the web browser experience, and only lessons created by ExpertVoice Studios appear in the search results.
You can search for and find educational lessons on the platform using the search engine on ExpertVoice. In the search engine, enter a word or phrase and click the Lessons tab to see all lessons associated with that search word or phrase.
- Lessons will appear based on their topic and the words in the lesson itself
- Lessons you have completed will have a green checkmark icon on the right-hand side
- You can filter the list of lessons by brand name and/or by if you have completed or not completed them
- After you complete a lesson from the search list, you can continue taking lessons from the brand, return to the list, or retake the lesson