REDMOND, Wash. — April 3, 2013 —
One of the biggest fears for website developers is that their visitors
click an internal search button on the site, can’t find what they’re
looking for and leave frustrated. Because every failed search can mean a
lost opportunity for business owners, elicit was founded to help people find what they are looking for within a website.
Conference Call
April 03, 2013
A
drag-and drop-interface lets the customer prioritize and target results
by context, time, keyword, location or any way they need.
Download: Web
The founders of elicit are all serial entrepreneurs who met when
working together at various startups. Brothers Eric and Adam Heneghan
are the co-founders of Giant Step, a digital marketing firm; Jeff Froom
is an application and interaction developer; and Chip Aubry is a
software architecture expert. While working at an interactive marketing
agency, they formed the idea for elicit based on feedback from
customers.
A client in the window manufacturing industry offered an extensive
range of sizes, materials and other options in its products. The
company’s website had poor search functionality, which made it difficult
for customers to find the exact products they wanted. The idea stuck
with the teammates, and they realized it would be helpful for their
client to have control over its website’s search functionality.
“We knew that site search was a universal problem that was crying
out to be fixed,” said Aubry, co-founder and vice president of
Architecture at elicit. “But with our agency backgrounds, we also
recognized that we couldn’t build a sustainable business by offering
one-off solutions. We launched elicit in 2011 to make a site-search
solution available to marketers at any website in the world, and we
chose a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model because it made sound
business sense.”
A Contrarian Approach: Less Automation, More Human Touch
To develop a solution, elicit approached the problem with the
understanding that searching an individual website is a vastly different
experience than broadly searching the Internet.
“People use ‘browse’ and ‘search’ in entirely different ways when
they’re looking for information,” said Aubry. “The algorithmic-based
approach of search engines that’s appropriate when sifting through the
entire Internet universe is not well suited to finding what you need
within a particular website.”
The team researched how website visitors actually behave when they’re trying to find something on a site.
elicit Screenshot
April 03, 2013
With elicit’s solution, marketers can determine the most effective keywords for their website.
Download: Web
“We found that when using elicit on a website, 50 keywords and
associated synonyms represent approximately 50 percent of the searches
on that site,” said Aubry. At that scale, it’s easier to put keyword
search control into the hands of humans rather than algorithms.
The elicit solution lets marketers paste a simple JavaScript
analytics tag directly onto their websites, then determine the most
effective keywords for their site and prime them into the system using a
simple drag-and-drop interface.
Keywords can be changed as often as needed to take advantage of
new products, promotions, marketing campaigns or evolutions in customer
search behavior. elicit search is also designed to work on social media
sites and mobile devices as well as on any website.
“We’re challenging the point of view that says site search needs
to be primarily automated,” said Aubry. “By emphasizing human curation
over algorithms, elicit search decreases SEO-generated noise in search
results, allows for fine-tuning and control of search results and
descriptions, and vastly improves the effectiveness for both customers
and marketers.”
The Confidence to Take Risks
The team works with marketers and retailers to make site search a
powerful tool. Early adopters of elicit are reporting that their
click-through rates doubled and abandonment rates dropped by half.
Still, every startup faces risks, even for veterans of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
“We wouldn’t have been able to create what we did without the support of the Microsoft BizSpark program and Windows Azure technology,” Aubry said. “BizSpark
allowed us to take risks in pursuing our contrarian approach without
having to worry about overspending at the beginning of our venture.”
The elicit founders also chose Windows Azure SQL Database to manage the application data because it worked well with their existing ASP.NET and Visual Studio 2012 technologies and could help them scale to meet the demands of their clients’ high-traffic websites.
“Windows Azure takes care of things such as provisioning the
virtual machines, firewalls, load balancing and redundancy, so we can
focus on building our application and making it great,” said Aubry.
elicit also takes advantage of the SaaS model to implement
frequent improvements to its search solution. The team consistently
talks to its customers to gain valuable feedback about how it can make
elicit search even better.
“As soon as we come up with a new feature or a performance
improvement, the SaaS approach lets us push it out immediately to our
customers,” Aubry said. “More often than not, though, our customers
report that they are delighted to have such a simple and powerful way to
control their site search.”
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