June 2016

The June 2016 release includes search relevance improvements, enhanced speed and integration enhancements with Google Analytics.  Additionally, the new Index Status page which has been in active development for the past few months is now generally available to all users. Enjoy!

June 2016 Summary:

• New: Import Google Analytics sales history for parent/child products
• New: Improved relevancy when searching for measurements
• New: Improved Google PageSpeed ranking for static assets
• Released: Index Status Page
• Improved: Revenue Insights

New: Import Google Analytics sales history for parent/child products

Searchspring is now able to import sales activity for sites that track conversions at the child SKU level in Google Analytics.

While users have long had the ability to connect Searchspring and Google Analytics, this update enables best seller sorting for users that have parent/child products. This enables users to leverage Google Analytics ecommerce tracking data to influence the ranking of products displayed by Searchspring. Common examples including promoting best selling items to the top of search and category pages, or offering shoppers the option to sort by best sellers.

New: Improved relevancy when searching for measurements

The Search and Relevancy engineering team has improved our measurement parsing algorithm to better handle variations of measurements regardless of spacing. Searchspring’s measurement algorithm already understands hundreds of measurement types (like length/width/height, capacities, diameters, volumes, etc) and this update further increases the number of searches that Searchspring is able to optimize.

New: Improved Google PageSpeed ranking for static assets

We have added gzip compression to all files on our CDN to improve Google PageSpeed ranking for all users with AJAX integrations, Now browsers that support gzip compression (which is all major browsers) will be able to download our Javascript and CSS files faster.

Released: Indexing Status

After a few months of testing, the new Indexing Status page is available to all users. This includes the index status icon in the SMC header (on every page).  The new display makes it clearer what step of the indexing process is currently running and what’s going to happen next.

Additionally, The Live Indexing Log page has been removed from the SMC.  This page was being used by only a couple of users to debug Live Indexing issues and those customers have been notified of the change. We will be adding more indexing status and error information to the Indexing Status page in the future to help both users and our support team debug indexing issues.

Revenue Insights (alpha)

Revenue Insights received a redesign this month as it is being used in customer-facing ways.  While the feature remains in alpha, the CS team has been teasing it with customers and it has been well-received so far.