CASE STUDY

Verathon Implements Site Search on Acquia
in Less than 30 Days

Promoted Searches Are Used to Deliver a Better Search Experience

Bryan Schnabel from Verathon

SearchStax takes away the complexity of Solr and makes it easy
to get the search results we want for our customers.

Bryan Schnabel
Manager, Digital Experience

About

Verathon is a global manufacturer of innovative and specialized medical equipment operating in over 60 countries. It is part of the Roper Technologies family of companies and is based in Bothell, Washington.

Situation

Verathon had been using an antiquated CMS to manage their website and they were not satisfied with their website presence or experience. To address these concerns, they embarked on a website redesign project using Acquia’s platform as a service based on Drupal 9 to deliver a better website experience for their customers. 

For search on the new website, the original approach was going to use straight out-of-the-box Solr. Based on previous experience, the team knew that Solr was going to be really hard to train and tune to get the search results they were expecting. Plus, the team wanted search analytics to know what customers were searching for which are not included with plain vanilla Solr. Key requirements included the identification of the top search terms and most popular content along with searches that delivered no results. They also wanted to leverage other metrics such as click-through rates and abandonments that are not available without significant customization.

Solution

To meet their business needs for a more practical and insightful search engine, Verathon started exploring opportunities with SearchStax in early October and entered into a sales agreement in late October to purchase SearchStax Site Search.

They selected SearchStax based on the out-of-the-box search dashboard and analytics, and for the easy-to-use tools that their marketing team could use to shape the search experience for their customers. Because there was an inflexible launch date for their new website, they needed to quickly implement and configure SearchStax to meet their launch date at the beginning of December.

Results

Because the Verathon implementation was able to leverage the SearchStax Drupal module and UX Accelerators, the project was able to go from Kickoff to Go Live in less than 30 days.

With access to the out-of-the box search dashboard and analytics in SearchStax Site Search, the team has added 90 different promotions to deliver a better search experience and make sure visitors are finding the right content to meet their needs. Promotions are a feature that lets marketers curate search results and push specific content such as top-line product pages, key blog posts or datasheets to the top of the search results. 

In addition, Verathon is also tracking two search-related KPIs on their Marketing Dashboard that they are sourcing from SearchStax – click-through rate and percentage of no result searches to total searches.

Product

Site Search

Platform

Acquia

Location

North America

Industry

Medical Technology

Implemented in less than 30 Days

Search Analytics are driving insights for the Marketing Dashboard