Insights is the built-in statistical tool for Intranet Connections software, providing admins with tools to better understand intranet usage. Learn more in the Stats Overview article.
The Search dashboards give you visibility into the frequency of search terms and an indication whether users are finding what they're looking for in search. It only includes global searches, and excludes searches performed within an Application.
Trying to determine if the user was successful in searching is based on if they clicked through any result after searching. If a user enters a search term, and then immediately searches again (or moves on to another page), it counts as a “miss” (i.e. a search with no corresponding click-through).
Dashboards
The search category contains two dashboards:
- Top Searches - Most common search terms entered by users in global search
- Missed Searches - Searches which likely resulted in no results
Table Columns
Top Searches and Missed Searches dashboards display the same information, but sorted differently. Note that these dashboards respect the time frame options set in the primary filter, but changing All Sites to a specific Site has no effect, as global search goes across all Sites.
- Icon - Clicking the icon will go to global search and automatically populate the same search terms.
- Search Terms - The words or phrase exactly as entered by users in global search. Information in each row is specific to the search terms.
- Searches - The total number of times the term was searched. If one user searches multiple times, each search is counted towards the total.
- Click-Throughs - The total number of time a user clicked a search result after performing a search. Click-throughs do not include click to preview items in search. Because previews are not included, the click-through rate on staff names may be low, as personal information such as phone numbers are displayed in the preview.
- Click-Through Rate - The ratio of click-throughs that result from a search. Higher rates indicate better result relevancy for the search terms entered. Lower rates indicate users were unable to find a relevant search term results.
- Individuals - Individuals is the number of unique people who entered the search terms. Higher values indicate the search terms is a common request across the organization.
Top Searches sorts the results by the most popular searches. Missed Searches sorts the results by the most popular searches with the lowest click-through rates.
Example: Updating Items to Improve Search Results
Periodically, you can examine the Search dashboards to uncover issues where users aren’t finding what they need using global search. To get started:
- In the primary filter, choose a wide date range (i.e. few months to a year) to get an adequate amount of search events.
- In a Search dashboard (either Top Searches or Missed Searches) click the Searches column header to sort by the most popular searches.
- Scan down the table to find search terms which have both high Searches total and high Individuals total, but low Click-Through Rate.
In my example below, the word “spiced” was searched 40 times by 8 different people but has a click-through rate of 30%.
The first step is to determine what item they were searching for. If you can’t determine this from the search terms, the first step is to click the Export link to see more details. Clicking Export will download a .csv file you can open in Excel with more details for each search term.
To investigate “spiced” after downloading the .CSV file:
- Open .CSV file in Excel
- From the Data ribbon, click Filter
- From the dropdown arrow next to “search term” in Row 1, select “spiced”
- Uncheck Select All, and select pricing
Excel will then display the users who performed a search for “spiced”.
Above, you can see that Michele is the user who is struggling the most, but it appears that Frankie and Laura might have found a relevant result. Hopefully a quick couple of emails or calls should reveal what item Frankie is actually searching for.
Provided that item is in the intranet, the next step is to ensure the next time someone searches for spiced, it shows up higher in the list of search results. Navigate to the document, click on the Edit pencil, and in the edit view, put the search terms somewhere within the fields for this item.
Options for adding the search terms include:
- Add Search Terms to Title Field - The first choice is directly within the Title field. This is because matches of search terms within the Title field are boosted to the top of search results. e.g. Title: Q1 2017 Price List (Pricing)
- Add Search Terms to Summary - If it's not possible to change the title field, or if you have multiple search terms you need to enter, the next easiest choice is in the Summary field. Items with “pricing” in the title will still appear above this document in the search results, but matches in the summary field will come next.
If you can’t add search terms to either the title or summary field, the next step would be to create a new field in the application to hold the search terms.
Tip: Don’t add search term as Tag. Intranet Connections uses tags differently than other applications. Tag are used to group items across various sites and applications and can be used as a filter for global search, under Search Tools. The tags however, are not used when trying to match search terms. If you want to keep search terms separate from an item’s title or summary field, it's recommended you add a new field and enter the search terms there.