A-Z index pages are very popular on our intranet. More popular than search. Our staff like to find what they want by looking it up in a list. If they don’t find it in the list they may resort to the search box. By looking at what phrases staff use when they perform a search from an A-Z index page, we can get a good idea of what’s missing from the A-Z listing.
Google Analytics has an inbuilt function to segment visits where staff used the search function. It was this functionality that highlighted our A-Z index pages.
I like to visualise a visit to the intranet as a trip to the convenience store. A member of staff needs something. Some people enter the store and walk up and down the aisles trying to locate what they need (menu navigation). Some look up where to go in a catalogue (A-Z index). Some enter the store and immediately ask for help (search) and others ask for help as a last resort. It is this asking for help as a last resort (searching) that can benefit us.
When I looked at the segmented analytics showing only those visits in which a search occurred, it showed, unsurprisingly, that lots of people search from the homepage, equivalent to entering the store and immediately asking for help. Equally unsurprisingly, lots of our popular pages are showing up. But also high in the reports were our A-Z index pages, indicating that lots of staff are going to the A-Z listings and then having to search.
Having highlighted a problem, I can now take action. I can target the A-Z pages and produce analytics that will tell me which search terms are being used when staff resort to using search from these pages. I can then feed these terms back into the A-Z listings, if appropriate, and over time, improve our offering.
Staff who search from the homepage are just using their preferred method of getting to content. Staff who repeatedly search from an area of content deeper within the intranet structure may highlight a symptom that there is a problem with the content.