August 2016

This August 2016 release includes several improvements and bug fixes to search, merchandising and insights.

Summary:

• Improved: Standard reporting speed and accuracy has been improved significantly
• Improved: Merchandising from within Insights
• Improved: Dynamic Autocomplete not tracking site search queries in Google Analytics
• New: Revamped BigCommerce product data sync integration
• Improved: Google Analytics integration the Searchspring Management Console
• Bug Fix: Whole numbers (integers) in decimal fields
• Improved: Landing Pages

New: August 2016 Insights Email (alpha)

Some users are starting to receive a monthly report that shows month-over-month ecommerce performance trends.  We’re working with Customer Success to gather feedback on the new report with the goal of making this an opt-in report available to everyone on a monthly basis. (If any of you use Zendesk, we’re shooting for something similar to their monthly customer support analysis they send out)

Improved: Landing Pages

We are beta testing Landing Pages with a few users. Landing Pages allows merchandisers to manually create a page of products, with up to 10,000 products per page!  Landing Pages are great for promotional pages or other targeted marketing campaigns.  Landing pages can be linked from promotions on your home page, sent out via email, linked to PPC or social ads, linked within Pinterest posts and many other possibilities.

This month we added advanced product search to Landing Pages to make it easier to find and add products. We have also added a “cursor” to the page so that products can be inserted at any location on the page. As a fast, double-clicking a product will move it to the current cursor location. All of these enhancements should make it even faster to merchandise products to your exacting specifications.

Improved: Standard reporting speed and accuracy has been improved significantly

Introducing Prometheus

The Searchspring engineering and devops teams have been working hard over the past several months to build a new Apache Spark-based platform for ecommerce reporting and site search analytics.  We’ve had a lot of success leveraging Spark for our product data indexing operations and we’re excited to bring this technology to our site search analytics tools as well. Internally, we’re calling the new system “Prometheus” (not to be confused with the open-source project of the same name).

Faster site search reporting for Searchspring users

One of the first benefits our users are realizing from this effort is faster and more accurate reporting.  Until recently, many users experienced issues pulling reports – often they were slow to load, lagged behind recent days or were missing data.  (The previous system built on MySQL would take 18+ hours to process a single day’s worth of site search and shopping activity)

Today we’re pleased to announce that reporting is much faster, more accurate and more up-to-date than ever. The new Spark-based solution is horizontally scalable, which means Searchspring reporting will keep up with the rapidly growing shopping activity levels of our retailers.  We can process a day’s worth of data in minutes, and months to years worth of data in a matter of hours.

One of the benefits we’re most excited about is our ability to rebuild reports for all of our historical log data.  This performance improvement means the engineering team can test reporting and attribution changes to not only new data, but also all historical data as well.  This makes it significantly easier for our team to continuously deliver more accurate and richer reports.

Improved: Merchandising from within Insights

When attempting to create or edit a merchandising campaign from the Search or Category Insights pages, clicking the “Merchandise” link would result in a broken campaign if a campaign with the same trigger, but with different capitalization, already existed.  This bug has been fixed and all “Merchandise” links should either successfully create a new campaign or open the currently existing campaign.

Improved: AJAX v3 with Google Analytics

AJAX v3 Autocomplete was designed to increase search speed performance by display search results immediately without reloading the search page.  However, it was discovered that this disrupted Google Analytics site search tracking so this speed enhancement has been removed, and the GA tracking issue has been resolved.

New: Revamped BigCommerce product data sync integration, August 2016

For BigCommerce clients, we have significantly improved the feed-generation process, cutting feed generation times by up to 90%.  Now BigCommerce clients can include Custom Fields, SKU Options, and other data in their feeds without being restricted to only 20,000 products. (We now have BigCommerce retailers that have over 500k+ SKUs on a single site powered by Searchspring)

Improved: Google Analytics integration

Connecting Google Analytics to Searchspring augments the data that we can provide to our users.  We have updated the Google Analytics integration process to make it faster and easier for clients to connect Searchspring to their analytics.

Bug Fix: Whole numbers (integers) in decimal fields

In the rare circumstance that a decimal field is set as a facet but not configured with range values, it is possible for a facet option to display whole numbers.  Clicking on these filters, however, would result in zero products (which should never happen when clicking on a facet option).  This bug has been fixed and all facet options, whether they are whole numbers or decimals, should always return products.

Thank you for reading the August 2016 product updates