INSIGHTS 101 - Search insights and optimization tools

The insights dashboard home screen is composed of several features, which perform different functions. These include:

Selecting a results page tile from the insights dashboard overview screen opens a dashboard for optimizing and analyzing the selected results page.

The main area of the results page insights dashboard provides access to all the analysis and optimization tools and displays a tile for each containing a summary of the tool.

The analysis tools of the insights dashboard provide insight into both search user behavior, and the underlying content available to Funnelback.

The optimization tools of the insights dashboard provide the ability to refine result pages in a range of ways, to improve the search user’s experience.

The main search analytics screen provides a summary of search activity on the current service for the specified time frame.

Hovering over the chart provides additional information on the number of searches, clicks and best bets clicks for the given day.

The period of time covered by the analytics reports can be adjusted using the timeframe control located at the top right hand corner of the screen.

The menu allows selection from set a of pre-defined relative time frames, or specification of a custom time period.

The analytics updates automatically when the time frame is changed.

Clicking on the compare button allows you to define a second time frame. This allows for graphs to be produced that compare the analytics over the different time frames.

Clicking on the searches item in the menu opens the searches report. The searches report provides information on searches conducted by users of the service.

The searches report covers the most commonly searched keywords, which provides an insight into what the information site users seek and find most important.

The report also examines the top searches that returned no fully matching results. This information is a vital source of information that can be used to improve the experience of users of the search service.

The clicks report provides insight into what users are viewing or clicking on as a result of using the search feature of your site.

A click is registered when a user clicks on a search result, noting not only the URL of the result item clicked on but the position of the item in the result set and the search query that was used to obtain the results.

The click information is also used by Funnelback to influence the ranking of search results. For example if lots of users run a search for the term avocado and consistently click on the second result on the results page then this result will eventually get pushed up in the rankings.

The locations report provides information on the location and demographics of users of the search.

The trends report provides information on the search trends by listing search keywords that have seen a significant increase in query volume in a short space of time.

These increases, or query spikes, can alert an administrator to topics that have suddenly become popular among users. This could indicate reaction to a news story that has broken, or a report that was recently released.

These trend alerts can be used to enable an organisation to react with greater speed to the changing needs of users.

When a trend alert is raised an administrator can check the query and verify that the results returned are appropriate, or take steps (such as adding best bets or synonyms) to ensure that users are directed to appropriate information.

You can access the content auditor report by selecting the content auditor tile from the insights dashboard, or by clicking the content auditor link from the results page detail page in the search dashboard.

The recommendation screen within the content auditor provides you with a number of different reports about the overall quality of your content.

The overview tab reports on the top values found for each of the metadata fields covered by the content auditor report.

Metadata fields that are configured but missing in all the pages are suppressed.

Each metadata field can be explored further by clicking the corresponding view all button, or the report filtered to just the specific metadata value by clicking on one of the values.

The attributes tab provides a complete list of metadata values for each metadata field that is included in the content auditor report. Clicking on one of the values in the list will restrict subsequent reports to documents containing that metadata value.

The search results tab lists the individual pages that match the current search criteria which consists of any search terms entered into the search box filtered by any of the metadata values selected on other screens.

The results are returned as a table that shows the metadata values for each item along with some tools linking in with other parts of the insights dashboard.

The table lists:

The listing can be exported as CSV.

Additional tools are available for each item in the listing providing quick access to the tool in the context of the selected page:

Accessibility auditor analyses the web content from HTML and PDF documents as the pages are gathered and checks the content for WCAG compliance, producing a report on the WCAG compliance and also providing advice on how to correct the detected errors.

The Funnelback accessibility auditor tool is a great tool for checking your site for accessibility compliance, but should not be the only method used to check content. The auditor tool only checks the accessibility of machine-readable HTML and PDF content. A large number of checks required for full WCAG compliance require manual checking.

The main services page within the insights dashboard displays a summary of the current accessibility auditor conformance for the service.

The accessibility auditor overview provides a snapshot of the accessibility compliance of pages belonging to the current results page. This provides an at a glance summary of the current performance, and also a way to immediately see the affected pages at each accessibility level.

The screen is made up of a number of widgets:

The documents report provides a document-centric view of the WCAG compliance for pages belonging to the current results page. The report lists documents that are affected by WCAG issues sorted by the number of issues.

This report can be used to prioritize which documents should be fixed first. For example, reduce the total number of affected documents on a site more quickly by fixing those with fewer errors, or make high value changes by identifying and fixing errors that affect lots of pages.

The report offers a number of refinement options allowing the report to be focussed on more specific tasks. Various facets allow the documents report to be filtered by various attributes such as sub-folders (URL) or WCAG compliance level (levels). Keyword filtering is also possible and will filter the report to only documents that include the specified keyword(s).

Clicking on the document title opens the document report for that single document.

The document audit report provides detailed information on all the detected failures and issues that need review for an individual document.

The report consists of a number of panels:

Clicking the audit again button runs a real-time audit of the document. This allows for fixes to be made to the document and the changes checked in real time.

Clicking on one of the success criterion shows the different techniques that have generated failures against the criterion.

The icons on the left indicate the confidence of the machine checks:

Clicking on a specific technique failure provides further information on the failure and suggested steps on how to resolve the issue. The source code also highlights the regions of code where the error was detected.

Clicking on a highlighted error or selecting view summary from the failures popup menu opens a window with information about the issue, how to fix it and also provides an administrator with an option to acknowledge the issue.

The success criteria report details the affected documents broken down by success criterion. The report can be filtered by WCAG level and POUR principle allowing an administrator to focus on the failing success criteria, and thus prioritise which techniques need to be addressed to attain the desired level of WCAG compliance.

Clicking on an individual success criterion (either in the listing, or in the bar chart) opens a screen providing more detail on the specific criterion.

The techniques report lists failures against specific WCAG techniques.

The issues can be filtered by various attributes.

The table of issues provides the issue name and number of times the issue was detected as well as information on the WCAG success criteria and levels that the issue affects.

Clicking on a technique will load a technique level report showing information about the technique and pages that are affected.

An acknowledgment can be used to manually mark an issue to be ignored. Many of the WCAG checks are not black and white and will only be an error in certain circumstances that cannot be determined by a computer.

This means that a number of checks will be marked as needs review - because manual review is required to determine if the issue is actually a failure.

When creating an acknowledgment options are available to control the scope of the acknowledgment (whether it affects just a specific occurrence or wherever the issue is found) and also to record justification for the acknowledgment (in case an audit trail is required).

The SEO auditor summary provides summary information about the document and how it performs for the specific query.

The summary also provides information on the number of indexable words found within the document, broken into the total number of words and number of unique words.

The start over button allows a new SEO audit to be performed on a different URL and set of keywords.

The top ranked results section provides a comparison between the page of interest and the top 10 results for the query.

The chart provides a breakdown of the factors that influence the ranking score for the page of interest and each document in the top 10 results.

The colors on the bar chart correspond to various signals in the ranking algorithm, showing you what proportion of the final score came from the signal.

The signals included in the bar chart are:

Hovering over the results in the table provides a quick audit button allowing an SEO audit to be performed for the specific result, with the current query.

The final section of the SEO auditor report provides optimization advice on how to improve the ranking of the page of interest.

The section is broken into a number of sub-topics that provide advice and charts showing how the page of interest compares to the top 10 results for the specific ranking factor.

Best bets are managed from the best bets section of the insights dashboard. The best bets screen provides tools for creation, editing, cloning and deletion of best bets, and also the ability to publish and unpublish.

Best bets are created, edited and published using a simple edit screen on the administration and insights dashboards.

The curator management screen allows an administrator to create, edit, clone, publish and unpublish curator rules.

Triggers are added on the When the search request match this criteria …​ tab.

A curator trigger is a set of conditions that when satisfied result in the curator rule running.

The curator trigger can be made up of a number of different trigger conditions that are combined to form the overall curator trigger.

Each of the curator trigger conditions consist of a trigger type and any additional fields that are required for the type.

Trigger conditions are collected into trigger groups. Each trigger group contains one or more trigger conditions

Once you’ve added your rule triggers, define what the rule does by setting up at least one action. Actions are added on the Then do these actions …​ tab.

Each curator rule once triggered can execute one or more actions chosen from the following action types:

Actions are added and combined in a similar manner to triggers.

The training data editor is accessed from the insights dashboard by clicking on the tuning tile, or by selecting tuning from the left hand menu.

A blank training data editor is displayed if tuning has not previously been configured.

Clicking the add new button opens the editor screen.

The tuning requires 50-100 examples of desirable searches. Each desirable search requires the search query and one or more URLs that represent the best answer for the query.

Two methods are available for specifying the query:

Once a query has been input the URLs of the best answer(s) can be specified.

URLs for the best answers are added by either clicking the suggest URL to add or manually add a URL buttons.

Clicking the suggest URLs to add button opens a panel of the top results (based on current rankings).

Clicking on a suggested URL adds the URL as a best answer.

Additional URLs can be optionally added to the best URLs list - however the focus should be on providing additional query/best URL combinations over a single query with multiple best URLs.

A manual URL can be entered by clicking the manually add a URL button. Manually added URLs are checked as they are entered.

Clicking the save button adds the query to the training data. The tuning screen updates to show the available training data. Hovering over the error status icon shows that there is an invalid URL (the URL that was manually added above is not present in the search index).

Once all the training data has been added tuning can be run.

Tuning is run from the tuning history page. This is accessed by clicking the history sub-item in the menu, or by clicking the tuning runs button that appears in the start a tuning run message.

The tuning history shows the previous tuning history for the service and also allows users with sufficient permissions to start the tuning process.

Clicking the start tuning button initiates the tuning run and the history table provides updates on the possible improvement found during the process. These numbers will change as more combinations of ranking settings are tested.

When the tuning run completes a score over time graph will be updated and the tuning runs table will hold the final values for the tuning run.

Once tuning has been run a few times additional data is added to both the score over time chart and tuning runs table.

The tuning tile on the insights dashboard main page also updates to provide information on the most recent tuning run.

Funnelback’s top searches report shows you the most popular searches, ranked by popularity.

This provides a window into the information that users are seeking and helps an administrator understand the website audience.

Better still, this information allows prioritization to be given to content creation and maintenance.

Funnelback’s top unanswered searches report shows the most frequent searches that did not return any fully matching results.

This is a very useful report as it helps to identify:

Organizations are often constrained to use particular language for many reasons such as corporate style.

This can result in internal language; acronyms or jargon being spread across a site - language that doesn’t match what a user knows (or cares) about.

An example of this is the difference between lawyer (in common usage it’s used to refer to basically any legal practitioner) and more technical terms used such as barrister, Queen’s counsel etc. From an end-user point of view these terms should be equated.

Another common problem is the use of acronyms, such as UK, HK, USA etc.

Synonyms can be used to transform user language into internal language by equating or expanding the terms.

Examples:

Note: United Kingdom is specified as a phrase to ensure the expansion only matches when the phrase is present.

Funnelback will automatically return spelling suggestions for user queries. However why not automatically correct the query where the intent is obvious if the non-matching query log indicates a high number of queries with incorrect spelling. This reduces a click for the user and improves the user experience.

Synonyms can once again be used to automatically correct the spelling.

E.g. When a user searches for goverment search automatically for government.

The robots.txt standard specifies a site configuration file (robots.txt) and some meta tags that can be used to control web robots such as Funnelback.

Robots.txt can be used to instruct Funnelback (and other web robots) to ignore complete folders within your website.

The robots.txt file is read when the Funnelback first visits the site and every new URL is checked against the robots.txt file before it is downloaded and included in the index.

Robots meta tags can be placed within the header of the page to tell a web robot whether to index and follow any links in the page containing the meta tag.

This can be used to exclude certain pages from being indexed without stopping Funnelback from crawling through the site.

Funnelback provides configuration options for defining what should be included and excluded from a crawl of a website. These include/exclude patterns and strings of text that are matched as substrings or regular expressions against the URL. Any URL that doesn’t match a pattern (include/exclude) it will be rejected by the web crawler.

Funnelback also provides site administrators with the ability to mark sections of a page as containing content that should not be indexed. These tags can be used to hide navigation and page headers and footers from the indexer. This means that the search results will only match within the content area of a page.

Noindex tags can usually be included within a site template and are an excellent and low cost method of improving search relevancy.