Search-Powered Web Apps

This post is written by Lijit’s COO, Walter Knapp, who loves data points of any kind. And bikes.

Every once in a while things just seem to make sense. In any business, when things are really working well, it becomes almost easy. Your target market is well-defined and your offering/value-proposition resonates with your customers. You have a great team that’s inspired, smart, and works hard. Customers, shareholders, and employees are happy. Life is good.

Problem is…that seldom happens.

From the start, we’ve been working at Lijit to be an advocate for the online publisher. We started with bloggers and blogging networks. More recently, it’s expanded to commercial publishers. The great part is that across this scope, nearly every constituency is interested in varying degrees of the same (3) things: more readers, more reader engagement, and more page views.

In our role as a publisher advocate, we recognized these three pillars early on. More recently, we’ve begun to do some detailed analysis on the data we capture and relate back to our publisher community through their Lijit statistics.

A couple of interesting data points:

• On average, 30% of all our publishers’ traffic comes to their site through a horizontal search engine (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.). The most common behavior is to read the page and then click the back-button (check your exit path if you disagree). Lijit has a unique functionality in our Re-Search box that shows the reader other, related content from the publisher’s site and network, resulting in more engagement and more page views.

  

• If a publisher installs the Lijit search widget, leveraging our search-cloud functionality, they generate an average of 2.5x more searches than a standard search box. We’ve seen this behavior as high as 10x in certain categories of content. Readers click on content in the search results more than 25% of the time a search is performed so this additional search behavior can have a dramatic effect in the number of page views and additional reader engagement.
• We share with the owner of the individual publication all sorts of search behavior. We give the publisher “intent” behavior in the form of search queries and resulting click data. We even point out when searches return no results, therefore giving more detailed insight into the expectations people have when reading a site, something no other service provides.

At Lijit, we just decided from day one to build a company that has the customer in our DNA. Is that so wrong?

Photo credit: chocolate monster mel

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 15th, 2008 at 12:49 pm and is filed under Lijit publishers, employees, publisher help. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.