Site search is easily overlooked when creating a new e-commerce site. After all, your navigation menus get readers everywhere they need to go, right?
Although this may be the case, it’s a matter of fact that your customers would much prefer a site search function so that they quickly find the products they’re looking for.
In fact, site searchers are 216% more likely to convert, and as many as 40% of visitors will use site search when it’s offered – potentially, that's lots of extra sales!
This isn’t surprising when you think about it. Site searches allow visitors to quickly find the exact product or article they're looking for. Without such a feature, customers might not ever find what they want and leave, even if you could have provided them what they're looking for!
Additionally, site searches enable you an even better understanding of your audience. You can draw valuable insights from your visitor's searches; more specifically, you'll get a feel for:
- What customers frequently look for
- How their search journey progresses
- The content visitors engage with the most
In light of that, we’re looking at a site search tool you can have up and running within minutes.
Cue, Sajari
This is a powerful search and discovery platform that aims to leverage the full power of site search. Below, we’ll outline what Sajari offers, how it works, and whether it’s worth the price tag.
Let’s jump into this Sajari Review!
What's Sajari?
Sajari has quite specific origins. Initially, its founders created it because of the difficulty they had conducting academic research. They soon found that just as academic searches were disappointing, so were most site searches. Barely any of them could stand up to the standard set by the likes of Google and Amazon!
In response to this dilemma, Sajari was explicitly designed as a search solution that utilizes machine learning. Sajari provides a much-needed solution for business sites, eCommerce stores, app searches, and government searches. This ensures visitors enjoy the best possible access to the content they need.
Fast forward to today, and Sajari is used by over 1,000 sites and serves over 20 million queries each day.
Sajari Review: Sajari's Key Features
Now that we've covered the basics, let’s take a peek at Sajari's core features. To get started with Sajari you’ll need to index your site. There are three ways to do that:
- Website Crawler: Good for small sites with simple schemas
- API: Good for eCommerce and larger sites with dynamic pages or complex metadata
- Shopify: Sajari is also available on the Shopify App Store for one-click install
Let’s go through a typical Website Crawler install:
Website Crawler
The Sajari website crawler explores your website, making it searchable within minutes. You don’t need any coding skills, and you can start for free. Just enter your domain name and let the crawler do its job.
During this process, the crawler instantly indexes your content. This index is automatically updated when content is added, changed, or removed.
The crawler automatically categorizes content using your site’s metadata to group results by context, topic, type, location, date, or other categories relevant to your business. You can ensure the accuracy of this categorization by adding custom tags to pages. These communicate to the crawler what content belongs where. On advanced plans, the crawler can even index your site's PDFs and MS Office documents.
You can also limit the crawler to only index pages you want to share with the public via search. This comes in handy if you wish to mark certain pages as off-limits.
Search UI
Sajari’s search UI is easy to customize. After indexing your site, you can click into the Integrate tab to view your site search. It will automatically create search filters for you and you can add additional filters with a little work. Colors, sorting, and grid view controls are all easy to update to match your site design. You can install your site search as an overlay (more popular) or with a standard search results page. You can also leverage the open-source React SDK to create an even more tailored search experience.
By default, the smart search bar includes autocomplete and spell correction to populate helpful search suggestions just like Google does.
Search Analytics
Delve into customer search queries to better understand their needs. Sajari tells you what customers are looking for on your site. Its analytics reveals search trends, including how search volume and click-through rates change over time. You can also review the top searches in any given week or month and identify when customer intent changes.
You’ll also gain an insight into fruitless searches or zero-result searches. These are great opportunities to come up with new content and/or products to meet the needs of your audience. For instance, do visitors keep searching for a specific how-to guide but can’t find one? If so, why not create one to make future visitors all the happier?
Finally, Sajari offers A/B testing. You can slice every report by pipeline and run different search configurations parallel to one another to help you understand which performs better on various report metrics.
Rules and Ranking
There are two ways you can adjust relevance and ranking:
- Rules allow you to set search-specific rules such as including or excluding content on your site
- Relevance Settings actually allow you to tweak the search algorithm to boost certain types of results, e.g., best selling or highest margin products
You can take manual control over your in-site search results with the no-code editor or advanced editor. These enable you to define which results are prioritized over others on your in-site search rankings. You can use categories, ratings, margins, or any other data to determine your hierarchy of search results.
You can also apply dynamic boosts to automatically elevate content that's appropriate for individual searches. For example, if your customers suddenly start purchasing protective face masks instead of beauty products when searching for “face masks”, the more popular products for this search term will automatically bubble to the top.
You can also define synonyms (e.g., “blouse” is the same as “shirt”) for likely search terms by mapping location, industry, or business-specific terms. You can support your events and promotions in the same vein by ranking promotional products higher and/or highlighting content from a specific category.
Your website's ranking settings can be updated anytime, and you can test different algorithm variations via A/B testing. But, don't worry, you can keep a backup if your changes don’t work out the way you want.
How to Install Sajari on Shopify
To install Sajari on Shopify, you'll need to navigate your way to the Shopify app store, search for Sajari and then install the Sajari ‑ AI Search & Discovery app.
With one click, you can install Sajari for your store. You will be redirected to the Sajari dashboard where you can customize your store using almost identical steps to the ones outlined in the previous section.
Shopify customers have slightly different pricing options than non-Shopify customers. Read more below.
Sajari Review: Pricing
If you’re just starting out and want a site search on your website, we have fantastic news for you. Sajari comes with a completely free plan! This applies to one web domain and supports a generous 20,000 queries per month. You can also keep 20,000 records and ten collections in your search library and access Sajari's online community for support.
Beyond this, Sajari has two premium plans and one Enterprise solution:
The Basic Plan
For $79 per month, Sajari supports 50,000 queries per month. You can also establish 50,000 records and collections across three web domains. Sajari's branding is removed, and you’ll get 30 days' worth of search analytics and history.
The Pro Plan
For $199 per month, Sajari supports 250,000 queries per month and 250,000 records. Your search history and analytics are extended to 90 days, and you benefit from machine learning and priority email support.
The Enterprise Plan
The enterprise plan is ideal for businesses with larger search volumes. You get access to usage-based records and queries, unlimited domain coverage, and phone and live chat support. Your history and analytics also cover two years of data.
On top of that, you can also make use of:
- Dynamic boosting
- PDF/DOC indexing
- Promotions and merchandising
- Multi-language support
- ML/Reinforcement learning
- Geo search
- A/B testing
- Personalization
- Audit logs
- third-party analytics integrations
- Dedicated support
- …and a 99.95% SLA
For more info about this plan, get in touch with the Sajari team for a quotation.
If any of these packages are calling out to you, it’s also worth noting you get two months free if you pay on an annual basis!
Shopify's Pricing
Sajari for Shopify has its own pricing. Again based on annual billing we've listed the expenses below:
The Starter Plan
For $19 a month, you'll get access to:
- 20,000 search queries a month
- You can store 20,000 records
- You can create ten collections
- You can connect with one web domain
- Access to email support
- A crawler
- Landing page/collection filters
The Standard Plan
For $69 a month, you get everything in the Starter package, plus:
- 50,000 search queries a month
- You can store 50,000 records (a record is a web page, product, PDF, etc.)
- Fair use collections
- You can connect with three web domains
- The removal of Sajari's logo
- 30 days worth of search analytics/history
The Business Plan
This package costs $199 a month, and includes everything in the previous two plans, plus:
- 250,000 search queries a month
- You can store 250,000 records
- You can connect with ten web domains
- Priority email support
- 90 days worth of search analytics/history
- PDF/Office documents indexing
- Promotions and merchandising features
- Multi-language support
- AI-ranking
- Geo search
- A/B testing
- Personalization
…Access control is also coming soon, so keep your eyes peeled for that!
The Custom Plan
If you're interested in an enterprise-level solution, contact Sajari directly for a custom quote. You can expect everything in the above plans, plus:
- Usage-based records
- Usage-based queries
- You can connect unlimited web domains
- Phone and live chat support
- Two years worth of search analytics/history
- Dynamic boosting
- Audit logs
- 3rd party analytics integration
- Dedicated support
Sajari Review: Customer Support
The type of customer support you get access to is based on the payment plan you opt for. Unfortunately, you only unlock Sajari's full support capabilities with its most expensive tier. Enterprise users can contact Sajari‘s customer support team via live chat and phone support.
On the lower premium plans, you get access to email support. But, the free package limits you to only seeking help in the online community. Here you can request new features and discuss any issues or questions you have with peers.
That said, having access to an online user community is a valuable asset. Sajari also offers FAQs and an online help center. Here you'll find extensive self-help documentation, including guides on how to get started, index, optimize search results, and integrate search into your site.
Sajari Review: Our Final Verdict
Sajari is a powerful, AI-driven site search platform that can help you meet your customer’s needs. Sajari offers a generous free plan with its general site search that we recommend checking out. Beyond this, however, it's worth noting that most of its machine learning features and more advanced customizations only become available with its premium plans. These come with a higher monthly price tag, which likely means small businesses working with a smaller budget might not be able to afford Sajari for their own stores.
Larger companies and enterprises, however, should find this powerful machine-learning platform very useful. Suppose you have the resources to spare to go all in and unlock dedicated support, advanced analytics, dynamic boosting, and search promotions. In that case, Sajari could make a massive difference to your conversions.
Let us know if you’ve given Sajari's free version or trial a go, and tell us how you got in the comments box below!
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