Help with PicoSearch

Do paying accounts get advanced statistics reporting? (reports, metrics, analytics)

One of the great advantages of controlling your own search engine is the ability to watch trends in your visitors' searching. PicoSearch offers a full set of online statistics reports which are easy to use, easy to print or download, and dynamically updated to include the latest searches.

With PicoSearch, you can quickly see what your visitors are searching for, what they're finding, and even what they're not finding. Not Founds are particularly useful for site design, to know what stores should be offering, and for anticipating customer typos. Paying accounts also get advanced downloadable reports that include the days, hours, and URLs being searched, with selectable date ranges to compare different past time periods. This adds up to essential feedback for guiding your site design, product line, and business development.

Free and Paid accounts both receive the following reports, with the difference being that Free accounts get very limited top searches, no download ability, and no past date range selecting (cumulative with reset only). For paid accounts, different selectable time periods will reveal different tops.
  • Search Totals: totals for all kinds of searches, including:
    • how many searches with results versus how many with no results
    • how many help calls (clicked on the help link), how many first searches versus how many follow-up searches in the same user session (how fast things are found)
    • how many "more results" calls (did they have to look past the first page of results)
    • how many single word versus phrase (quoted) searches
    • how many searches used special PicoSearch features like Booleans, Direct Searches and Hit Highlighting

  • Monthly Totals: running monthly totals for all searches and searches with no results found.

  • Top Queries Report: your visitors' top searches that returned results, just as they typed them. Top 20 for Free, Top 100 for Professional, Top 200 for Premium. Ex: news, news articles, "latest news"

  • Top Terms Report: your visitors' top words that were used in searches that returned results. Top 20 for Free, Top 100 for Professional, Top 200 for Premium. Ex: news, articles, latest

  • Top Not Found Queries Report: your visitor's top unsuccessful searches, just as they were typed. Top 20 for Free, Top 100 for Professional, Top 200 for Premium. Not Founds are incredibly valuable for growing your website! They show what your site should be offering, as well your users' common typos which may have led to PicoSearch's spelling corrections (for paid accounts). By knowing Not Founds, you might choose to sell new items in your online store, adjust your site to steer products better, or set PicoSearch Synonyms to catch common product misspellings and direct them to the right pages. For example: faqs (looks like your site needs an FAQs page), newss (no problem, the automatic correction news shows up in the top queries and terms), xxl (maybe your clothing store needs bigger sizes!)

Paid Professional and Premium accounts receive the following additional reports. All paid account reports can be generated for custom date ranges, and are downloadable in CSV (comma separated values) or XML formats for easy import to spreadsheets and other analysis tools.
  • Daily Usage: profiles for your search engine's daily and hourly traffic, customizable to your timezone. The profiles are easy-to-read bar graphs that show the number of searches across the days of the week, or across the hours of any day of the week, for any selectable time periods.

  • Top Documents Report: your visitor's top found page URLs, complete with the top queries that found them. Professional gets Top 40 pages with Top 20 queries each, Premium gets Top 80 pages with top 40 queries each. Different selectable time periods will reveal different tops.

  • Top Partitions Report: with your account manager's Partitions feature, you can sub-divide your search engine into different searchable sections. Partitions can be offered to your visitors in menu options for where to focus their search, or partitions can be kept silent and used for steering and tracking. Either way, the Partitions report shows the search totals for all of your partitions, complete with the top searches and top Not Found searches within them. Professional gets the Top 20 queries each, Premium gets the Top 40 each. Different selectable time periods will reveal different tops. (Not Founds per Partition became available starting June 2012)

  • Top Direct Searches Report: with your account manager's Direct Searches feature, you can link specific searches or patterns of searches to go directly to a best result page URL, with no list of results in-between. This can be great for getting customers to keyword selected products as quickly as possible, and the Top Direct Searches Report will show the activity this feature is getting. Professional shows the Top 40 directly searched pages with Top 20 queries each, Premium shows Top 80 directly searched pages with top 40 queries each. Different selectable time periods will reveal different tops.

  • Top Hit Highlights Report: with your account manager's Hit Highlighting feature, you can guide your search users to see marked up result pages that are easy to read and navigate for the hit words in context. This feature is very appealing to visitors, and especially useful for sites with long information-rich pages. The Top Hit Highlights Report will show the activity this feature is getting. Professional shows the Top 40 hit highlighted page URLs with Top 20 queries each, Premium shows Top 80 hit highlighted page URLs with top 40 queries each. Different selectable time periods will reveal different tops.

All printer-friendly reports look great and can form a running collection of views on your website and visitors' behaviors.

Note that if you are running statistical reports on your own server logs, there is an easy way to include the calls to your PicoSearch engine in your own server's statistics. Just put an invisible gif in your search results template that links back to your server, such as <img src="http://www.mysite.com/search_request.gif" width=1 height=1>. This will give you access to stats that you may have come to expect from your own server, such as IP and browser type (user agent).

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