CASE STUDY

APQC Improves the Search Experience
on their Drupal Website

SearchStax Site Search Delivers Analytics and Easy-to-Use Tools for Marketers

apqc logo
amanda-schalyo

Prior to SearchStax, we had no insight into our search analytics. In addition to analytics, we now have a whole host of capabilities to improve the search experience that I can use without having to involve our IT team.

Amanda Schalyo
Executive Director of Marketing and Digital Experience

About

The American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) is a member-based non-profit that has been in business for over 40 years. APCQ specializes in unbiased benchmarking and best practices research for process and knowledge management across 45 different industries.

Situation

APQC’s value proposition is dependent on having a state-of-the-art web user experience for their digital platform is critical. APQC has more than 10,000 pieces of research content and data that can be searched by the worldwide network of over 150,000 members.

APQC has been a Drupal shop for several years and uses Drupal to manage an efficient content production workflow for their website. The APQC website has more than 10,000 pieces of research content and data, and and a team of 12 people who conduct research and create new content for the website.

The Drupal website uses Solr to manage the search functionality and IT team had been hosting and managing Solr on their own. When the demands of the business for changes to the search experience could not be met by the IT team, APCQ looked for an alternative to self-hosted Solr.

Solution

After getting a demonstration of SearchStax Site Search, APQC realized that they found a solution that could give the business team the analytics they wanted and the easy-to-use tools to manage search on their own while freeing up the IT team for higher value tasks.

Using the common Solr cloud interface, APQC used the SearchStax Drupal Module along with the Drupal Search API and Search API Solr module to install Site Search. The SearchStax Drupal Module was written by drunken monkey, a longtime Drupal contributor and search expert, and integrates directly with Drupal and provides analytics directly out of the box.

The business team can now use the insights from the analytics to update the search experience by changing the boosting of fields and using promotions to elevate specific content to the top of the search results. 

Results

With SearchStax Site Search, the IT team can focus on the coding and other development priorities without having to worry about the Solr infrastructure. The business team can access analytics they didn’t have before and use SearchStax to manage and shape the search experience without needing to involve the IT team.

The analytics dashboard provides insights into what is being searched, what content is viewed in searches, click through rates and average position on the page. One early insight identified that end-to-end process maps were the most clicked content which led to featuring this content and creating a new marketing campaign. Another burdensome task in the past was adding search synonyms for the various abbreviations used in their industry. With SearchStax Site Search, the business team can easily and quickly add new synonyms in seconds. 

In this 3-minute excerpt from their 2021 DrupalCon session, the APQC team shares how they improved the search experience on their Drupal Website.

Product

Site Search

Platform

Drupal

Location

North America

Industry

Technology