Funnelback London Seminar - The Electoral Commission Case Study: Why they selected Funnelback and how it has improved their website search
At the Funnelback UK Seminar on the 31st of March, Chrystyna Chymera, Corporate Communication Officer at the Electoral Commission, presented a case study of their recent search project covering their project requirements and the results they achieved with Funnelback website search.
Here are Chrystyna's slides followed by an overview of the key points of her talk:
The Electoral Commission and Funnelback Search
Key Points:
- Chrystyna explained the need the Electoral Commission had for an effective search solution. As an organisation with a great deal of documents and information, most of which is required to be readily accessible to their users, they needed to be able to deliver easily navigable, accurate and fast search results. They also needed to have greater control over the rankings of search results and the ability to easily access search data and reports. Funnelback has provided solutions to each of these issues and more.
- Above all else, they needed accurate results out of the box, before any adjustments were made to the search system. Chrystyna related their initial exposure to Funnelback. They were shown a comparison of the search results from their previous solutions against those of Funnelback - Funnelback's results were significantly better.
- Often their users use different terminology to find the same thing or the same terminology to find different things. Funnelback's contextual and faceted navigation helps to make the results easy to navigate for the user and its Query Expansion functionality allows the Electoral Commission to specify the meanings and synonyms of relevant terms and to suggest alternative query terms.
- The Electoral Commission now have a much greater amount of control over results rankings. They can easily upweight or downweight results as they require, and they can create 'Featured Pages' to highlight timely or important results.
- Funnelback can handle multiple languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Thai. The Electoral Commission use Funnelback to search both the English and Welsh language sections of their site.
- Chrystyna noted that it was advantageous to them to be using MySource Matrix CMS as well as Funnelback, as the two technologies can be seamlessly integrated and supported by the team at Squiz. She also explained that, as they had limited technical knowledge or resource within the Electoral Commission, it had been beneficial to them to be able to receive support and training from Funnelback and Squiz.
- A final point to emphasise is the results that have been achieved with Funnelback. At the beginning of the project, conversion rates were at 22%. After just three months, through tweaking search rankings, conversions have increased to 52%, while clicks on Featured pages have more than tripled.
If you would like more detail, read the Electoral Commission Funnelback Case Study.
Visit the Electoral Commission website to try Funnelback search.
Published:
01 Apr 2010 11:34am
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