Our search before was pretty much a black hole, and we had no idea what people were actually searching on the sites. With Swiftype we now have incredible insights into search terms that are opening up new advertising and revenue opportunities.
EO Media Group is a private, family-owned publishing and printing company with 11 newspapers throughout the Pacific Northwest.
Swiftype powers search for the ad marketplace on Capital Press—one of EO Media Group's key digital properties.
They needed strong, cutomizable search with faceting and the ability to customize search queries.
EO Media Group grappled with how to improve search for a new ad marketplace on Capital Press, one of its key digital properties.
Biggest challenge? The marketplace platform would revolve primarily around search. After using solutions from current newspaper vendors, WordPress search, and related plugins for their sites, they realized none could handle the forecasted hundreds of thousands of searchable bits of content or help them drill-down into body copy for more relevant search results.
Frustration ran high for the small team, which wasn’t in a place to invest a ton of money into developers to build something from scratch.
With only weeks before the launch of the new ad marketplace, the team found Swiftype. In that window of time, Swiftype was deployed and “worked exactly as we expected right out of the box.”
Most importantly, Swiftype provided the key capability of faceting and a feature they didn’t realize would make a huge difference--promoted listings. This alone pivoted the EO Media Group digital team to a new revenue model. In addition, they consult the dashboard daily for metrics and insights that are both surprising and game-changing.
With the Swiftype implementation, EO Media Group discovered some new, unexpected business benefits: revenue and ad opportunities previously untapped and unknown.
For example, they found the term “livestock” was frequently searched. While the print publications had always sold to this industry, it wasn’t until the use of Swiftype that they realized its popularity digitally and the target opportunity for ad revenue. With detailed metrics now available, EO Media Group can go after both new and former advertisers alike.
As their deployment with Swiftype deepens, the company has seen: - An increase in users (43%), sessions (17%) and new (46%) and returning (31%) users, suggesting that the new platform is attracting more people and more often - 145% increase in ad revenue - 175% increase in users viewing a second page after making search the primary way of navigating the site - Advertisers selling out of products and services due to successful ad campaigns based on search
