In the competitive market for site search and web site analysis, Coremetrics Inc. and iPhrase Technologies Inc. are integrating their technologies to help retailers leverage search data to improve both search results and site navigation. More partnerships are ahead, Coremetrics says.
“As a result of this integration, Coremetrics and iPhrase clients will be able to track and analyze how site searches led to revenue,” says Matthew Lawson, product marketing manager for Coremetrics. Although retailers could still conduct such analysis without using an integrated platform from the two vendors, merchants would have to run two sets of cookies, or coding tags, on web pages in order to pull data from a search application into a site analysis application, he adds.
Other alliances are also underway among search and analytics vendors, including search firm Atomz Corp. and analytics provider WebSideStory Inc. Coremetrics is also working on integration projects with search firms Endeca Technologies Inc. and EasyAsk Inc., Lawson says.
“This will provide richer analytics against search results, to understand what search concepts are driving sales,” says Tony Frazier, senior vice president of marketing for iPhrase. What iPhrase brings to the integration project, he adds, is the ability to extend iPhrase’s visibility into the use of search terms to show what, if any, purchases resulted from site searches. By learning what visitors purchased and the search terms they used, retailers can redesign search results pages as well as merchandising displays to emphasize the most popular merchandise, he says.
Analysts say search and analytics integration is an important development that will help retailers leverage the tendency of shoppers to frequently use site search to find what they want. “Now retailers can find out what people are buying from site search, then play that up in site navigation and merchandising,” says Eric Peterson, site operations and technology analyst at Jupiter Research.
“I expect you’ll see more search vendor partnerships with multiple analytics vendors,” Peterson says.
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