Discover Texas Christian University's Blueprint for Success with Advanced Site Search

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  0:04  

Welcome everybody. We are a big group today from all over the country. I want to first thank Inside Higher Ed for facilitating this webinar today. As we’re starting here, we have a quick poll question that we’d love for you to participate in. I’ll go over that a little bit later, and we’ll be taking questions at the end, so feel free to drop those in the QA and we’ll try to get to all those when we conclude. If not, we’ll email you, but I’m going to go ahead and hand it to Corey Reed from TCU to do a quick intro. Sure.

Corey Reed – TCU  0:40  

Hi everyone. My name is Corey Reed. I’m the director of web management at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth Texas.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  0:50  

And I am Jeff Dillon, a digital strategist for higher education at SearchStax. If you really want to get Corey and I’s ear mention bikes, because we both are avid cyclists, so just a quick commonality there, but I was web director at Sacramento State for the last 13 years. Prior to that, I was at Northern Arizona University in a similar role, and so I still consider myself in that role of being a web director and kind

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  1:19  

of really in the trenches with everyone here. But in 2021 I left to create ed tech, connect a crowd sourced platform for higher ed tech. And that’s when I discovered SearchStax. And SearchStax is a search experience company that’s focused on elevating site search for higher education, and we’re really laser focused on higher education, and there’s a lot of reasons why. So we’re going to go over that and start off with the top challenges for higher education marketers. We really have so many of these. We’re not going to go into all of them, and we’ll touch on these, but starting off with an increasing student expectations. And this isn’t just from the digital experience side, where we’re competing with Netflix and Spotify for the digital native audience’s attention, but it’s really for the degree itself too. We’re going to touch on the complexity of higher ed my whole slide on that multi device access. How do we meet students where they are? Higher Ed really struggles with personalization. The complexity we have search is often an afterthought with that, and it’s really hard in higher ed to personalize. You know, we don’t have the budgets, and it’s just such a complex environment. Search and navigation is huge. 

Navigation is really challenging with the complexity we’re dealing with, and search is often an afterthought. So the big one that we’ll go into a little bit here is the enrollment cliff, as many of you’ve probably heard. And there’s a little more data that I have that I talk about a lot. It’s some information I found from College Transitions that really shows that we know that the birth rate, you know, 18 years ago, kind of fell off. We were expecting that. But there’s all these other factors at play that are really causing us to kind of struggle to build these, these incoming classes, the College Board has a student search service. Those names aren’t available anymore because these PSATs and SATs went digital. So the way we used to build these incoming classes with the student search service is just more difficult, and it’s affecting some of the schools. Certain types of schools are even harder, private two year colleges. They rely more on tuition dollars than they do federal funding or funding. So they’re being hit hard by schools in declining populations. They recruit from local, regional pools, and can’t afford to go outside of that. So it’s expected to hit these schools in the northwest and the Midwest pretty hard, but it’s something that we all kind of are aware about, are aware of, and we’re seeing a lot of schools come to us with these challenges in mind. And now I’m going to jump right into the layers of complexity in higher ed. We talk a lot about this, but before working, you know, with SearchStax here, I’ve been involved with many industries, and I was bringing digital experience platforms to state and local government, a little bit with financial institutions. But I can tell you, from my experience, I really think higher ed is the most complex environment industry vertical out there that I’ve worked with at least, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. 

One is the multiple personas we have. We have students, and they have all of these types of students, prospective students, current students, within current students. We have all these types of current students that have different needs. So this. Even a simplified version of all of our types of personas that we’re trying to satisfy on our website,parents, alumni, donors, and community can be broken down very, very granularly, then we have to layer digital governance on top of that. Right? We’re kind of the victims of our own success with all these content management systems that we implemented in the last 10 to 15 years that now have, sometimes hundreds of developers that we have to wrangle, and we used to say herd the cats to kind of, let’s, let’s have some, some guidelines, and it’s really challenging. But then we have all these types of content. It’s not just a website. So often your search is searching your website, you’re indexing your website. 

But even within websites, there’s all these types of websites. There’s faculty websites, which are kind of their own thing, often, right? The faculty kind of may have their own templates, and they’re in their special area all the way to the other side of where there’s program information that may or may not be in your course catalog that’s very authoritative and almost a contract with your students, event calendars, campus maps, research repositories, those things need to be found, and it’s getting harder and harder to find them. But then we have sub domains. Let’s layer sub domains on top of that, so all these types of content are living in these different areas. So let’s think of like engineering dot school name.com, so all the colleges might have their own sub domain, or the library, or the athletics might be on its own.com the auxiliaries, right? The food service. So it just gets more and more complex as you go up, and then we say, Oh, we just will have navigation, we’ll fix it, we’ll have card sorting, and we’ll have our new website. And that’s really challenging with our budgets, with this complex environment. So in comes search. We really think search can be this, this glue and tie it all together. And it’s, it’s kind of an underutilized part, part of all that Corey. What do you think ? Does this resonate? What’s the environment like at TCU with complexity?

Corey Reed – TCU  7:12  

you know, TCU is not a huge school, right? Well, we’ll get into a little bit of a university profile in a minute. But even no larger than we are, we still have all the complexity, or what feels like all the same complexities, these all these same challenges, and almost laughed out loud when you said, navigation right, because you’re right. So there’s so much emphasis placed on if we can just get the menu right? We can just manage the right taxonomy for the site. 

If we can just get the information architecture just right, it’ll make sense of all this content. But one of my team members used to call it a crazy quilt, right? We have this crazy quilt of information, and we’re trying to present it in a way that makes sense to everyone. And you even know from user testing, right, that we’re all very dynamic. We all come to websites differently. We bring our personality. We bring our, you know, our preferences to the table when we’re navigating content, and a menu bar has no chance on, you know, meeting everyone’s needs all the time. So I agree, we are complicated. Our content is super complicated, and Site Search is a more reasonable solution to this than the old, beloved menu bar.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  8:33  

Every school I’ve talked to relates to this in some way or another. So I like to, really like to talk about complexity. But in the beginning when we started this webinar, we did have a poll. Let’s put this poll out here, and this is the question we asked you. And so here were the options, faculty, contact info, careers or jobs. What are they searching for? Academic Programs, the library. And most of you got it right. This is kind of a myth out there, and we want to dispel this myth that search is only used internally. 

All people are just going, you go, Google Custom Search when they get on our website. These are just the internal people, but 73% of you got it right. 15% said careers or jobs, 8% said faculty contact info, and 5% said library. And to your credit, those are all pretty top searches on most websites. So they’re all popular, but academic programs are the most popular. And I’ve seen this data. It’s been out there for a while, like Forrester. Get to the right slide here, finding information about majors and programs is the number one reason prospective students visit the College website. Inside Higher Ed published this. I have experienced this myself and I’ve talked to dozens of schools. They’ve shown me their data. I. Or we’ve talked about it, and it’s there’s 10s of 1000s of searches being conducted on your homepage. That’s number one. It’s happening. So sure, they’re searching other places, but they are using your site to search, and they’re probably further along in their search when they look for something. 

So I don’t have that in a data format yet, because I’ve talked to a couple dozen schools, but this aligns with what I’ve seen with students looking for degrees. And let’s see, let’s go. So one of the things I’ve also discovered in talking to Corey and other schools is there are some really powerful search terms and use cases that that we’re seeing, this is kind of a newer thing that we’re seeing, and what we’re calling it is search for good. And it’s this idea that you can get ahead of things that might be aligned to your mission or your values, or I even like to say students need a very foundational level of support at a school. I have a diagram. I’ve created a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs where the foundation is safety and support, right to succeed up the ladder, that’s what their students really need. So what you’re looking at now is a list of key terms that TCU, along with a lot of other schools we’re seeing are implementing in their search to make sure the right turn and the right results are displayed. So they might not be the most popular. Maybe they’re seeing at a certain time, like COVID, yeah, that came up years ago. That was at the top. But if mental health is being searched, even if it’s not huge, you might want to make sure they get the right results. So Corey, you’re one of the schools that’s kind of leading this charge. Can you talk a little bit about these terms and how you’re using the search for good ideas that we’re presenting? Yeah,

Corey Reed – TCU  11:57  

boy, in this current political environment. You know, this strikes even closer to home, right? Because it’s interesting about connecting people and maintaining community when it seems like a lot in the public square, we’re often being driven apart. We know that student physical and mental health is a real priority, and it’s a very sensitive subject. We have some really talented people on staff that have developed some really great programs and resources to support students. They’ve done some pretty groundbreaking work, and we wanted to make sure that people could find that right. A lot of people might speak to that, and different faculty might have some research that touches on that. What we didn’t want is to have, you know, 1000 different matches on some research or some academic content to push like, Where, where are the mental health resources? Like, how can I talk to somebody right now, in this, in this moment, we didn’t want that getting buried under. Granted, great academic research, but academic research may not be the thing that saves a student’s life, right? But having access to the mental health support line and getting connected with a counselor is something that could and so we wanted to make sure that we could go in, simulate some searches, look at some data that’s being searched, and then use some of the interesting tools that are inside SearchStax, like a combination of promotions and content waiting just to make sure that we’re, you know, surfacing those, those resources at that, that time and point of need, right? So we can support our students.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  13:59  

One specific example, I don’t think it was TCU, but it was a different school. You may have done this too. Searching for transgender was pulling up a bunch of research, and they said, we just need people to find the bathrooms. So what they want to do is just send people to the department or the center that has all the answers. It was good we’re seeing more and more of those types of use cases. But can you, let’s talk about the bigger picture at TCU. Corey, just, can you give us a high level perspective of TCU and what you’re doing?

Corey Reed – TCU  14:32  

Sure, so we’re a private value based institution, like I mentioned. We’re in Fort Worth Texas. We have about 117 undergrad programs. We’re heavily undergraduate focused, but growing the graduate program, and we have 37 doctoral programs, about almost 13,000 total enrollment. And we really pride ourselves on and. Maintaining what we feel is a really nice student faculty ratio, trying to keep it around 1314, to one. So the idea is to try to be very high touch, to be very community oriented. We really think that, you know, the one on one support is a part of our brand, right? It’s a part of our values. It’s that experience that we want. 

And my admission team, they always tell me, you know, Corey, if we could just get somebody to come and step foot on our campus, they’re pretty likely to end up attending here, right? They’ll want to stick around if they come and see how friendly and welcoming we are in person. So I’m like, great. I’m now going to take that on myself professionally on the website, to try to make our web network that same level of welcoming. And, you know, having a robust search is a big part. It’s like the digital equivalent of having that really nice smiling face at the front desk that says, Hi. What can I help you with today? Right? So that’s kind of us in a nutshell. 

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  16:09  

can you talk a little bit about your team and your tech stack?

Corey Reed – TCU  16:14  

Sure. So we are an enormous, you know, lavishly funded team of five people. And you know, we’re, we’re keeping an eye on our network. We have several 100,000 pages of content, some number of sub domains. It’s in flux, right? And in general, we keep, we actively manage those top tier sites, what I consider top tier so you think of the www.tcu.edu core site for us, the colleges and the schools, those high level administrative sites like student recruitment, the registrar, Bursar, office, financial aid. 

And we house those almost exclusively on Modern Campus. We also have some WordPress in our tech stack. And of course, like a lot of our peers, we have a great many other legacy products and systems that we stitch together, and then we use localist and campus bird from concept 3d for a combination of our university calendar and our interactive campus map. And then we found ways that we can talk about later to stitch those together using SearchStax so that people don’t have to concern themselves with how complicated things are behind the scenes, right when it’s kind of a Wizard of Oz, just stay behind the curtain, pulling levers and

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  17:52  

So, just like everyone knows, when you say Concept 3d, Concept 3d acquired Localism a few years ago. So that is, that is their calendar. I like to put that on here, because it’s a pretty common calendar out there. But let’s talk a little bit about modern campus. You know, our SearchStax Site Search is agnostic. It doesn’t matter what CMS you’re using. The larger the school, the more CMSs they generally have. The smaller schools usually are a little more centralized. But specifically with your course catalog. How are you managing your course catalog with your website? And I think you said modern campus is kind of driving that too.

Corey Reed – TCU  18:26  

Well, it’s interesting because we have our course catalog that our registrar’s office uses. They’re using a different partner to house sort of the official course content with classes and that sort of thing. But we built out our own academic program page content, so basically all that high level top of the funnel academic program content that we talked about during the poll. We built all that in the Modern Campus. We built, we basically sat down, created a Content Matrix to decide what kind of information we needed to capture for those top of the funnel prospective students, and then thought through ways that we could make that more consumer friendly, right? So mix and match different program characteristics, and so we defined all that in modern campus, and then when we were ready to index it all and crawl it with SearchStax, we’re able to use that rich metadata to then turn on some of those advanced search features. Correct. Yeah.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  19:40  

Well, let’s take a look. Let’s see what you’re doing at TCU here. Oh, and let’s talk about the strategy first, what really drove your decision to enhance your site search?

Corey Reed – TCU  19:56  

Sure, so I mean long story short is. All about trying to deliver a really nice customer experience or user experience. You know, like I mentioned, we kind of pride ourselves on being a friendly, welcoming place and trying to make the web our web presence that same way. We wanted to make a great experience for people. We wanted them to come away feeling good about their touch points. So in order to have a good plan, we wanted to make data driven decisions. So it’s too easy to get into a planning meeting or a project meeting, and it’s sort of a war of opinions, right? Where it’s like, whoever’s going to speak loud enough, right? And be like, No, my opinion is more factual than your opinion. So we wanted to be data driven, which means you have to have good analytics. That was a big piece of it. 

And then the second sort of leg of that stool would be, we wanted to break down or stitch together all those different pockets of page data. You know, you mentioned, there’s research, there’s content, there’s a great many of lots of really interesting stuff out there in the network, but it’s in these little pockets, you know, it’s sort of hidden under a bushel basket. And so we wanted to bring those all together and flatten them out. And then the last piece is, we know, even though we’re a little bit removed from some of those dates and deadlines, because we don’t all have, you know ourselves, or a student or someone close to us, that’s that’s dealing with those deadlines, but we know that they’re there, and we want to track those things we might keep top of mind. Okay, I wish that we know when our admission deadlines are right, but what about things like summer camps and, yeah, you know? So the graduate deadlines are different from undergrad. So we wanted to be able to address those.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  21:56  

It’s very cyclical, right? Every year, it’s kind of the same, you know, cycles that you were seeing is what I experienced. All right. Well, then, with these strategies, the strategy in mind, we’ll take a look at TCU’s site search. Want to walk us through sure site search here. Corey, yeah,

Corey Reed – TCU  22:16  

all right. So basically, what we wanted to do is give someone a one stop shop so they could see some major sections of our content, right? So we know from user testing that people think of our network of sites as being one monolithic site, which would make our lives a lot easier if it were, but it’s not. So we wanted this all results experience just to kind of flatten it out and, you know, bring everything together, and then take advantage of what search text calls facets, right? So if you see on the left hand side, we have a couple of common facets, so document type probably makes sense to most folks here on the call category. And then you can, we have more, you can define any number of facets. So this is the main kind of your Google style search experience. And then, because we know that program content is always, I mean, year round, it’s in our top 10 most visited pages in most searched search queries. So we wanted to put program information front and center. And so if you notice when we switch to the Programs tab now the facets that are on the left hand side are specific to this content. So it’s really easy to then narrow it down to say, I’m really specifically interested in the graduate certificate program or something like that. And you can really narrow down your results pretty quickly.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  23:55  

Yeah, I might have done that quick fast here. We’re in a slide deck here. So like, if I click on all results, I’ll go back, so you can see I’m highlighted on that, but the like Corey is saying the fastest on the left are contextual. And I’ll click one more time here, and we’ll go over to the campus map. Sure.

Corey Reed – TCU  24:08  

Yeah. And so we’ve mentioned the Localist for the university calendar. This is a concept 3d-interacted campus map. We’ve had it. We had had it for several years, right? And people knew about it, but we thought that we could, we could drive more engagement with the interactive map. We could answer more questions if we just put it front and center so they don’t have to memorize yet another sub domain. So we added it, and we’re seeing a spike in engagement with our map, which is great, because even no larger than we are, it can be a little bit confusing for folks, you know, they’re fresh to campus, they want to find their way around. And now we’ve, we’ve embedded it right? In the search experience. So,

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  25:01  

so I love, like, I love showing this site Corey, because, you know, when we talked about the complexity earlier, this is what you’re going to see more and more of out there. This isn’t, I would say, the standard yet, but it’s becoming more like, how do we handle all these different silos of content? These tabs at the top are a great example of what you can do. A couple others that we often work with are an events calendar or a directory information research repositories. So those facets, those taps at the top, can be whatever, whatever you want. So I just wanted to really point out this, this lab is kind of becoming the go to, really higher ed type of user experience. So it’s great to show what you’re like in the front end of the user experience. Let’s go to the other end and see, see what, what does data look like, and what did data look like before you went with SearchStax? What are we looking at here? Corey,

Corey Reed – TCU  26:08  

all right, so, so Jeff asked me, What kind of search analytic data do you have with your current solution? And so I just logged in and I pulled some and I’m like, Here you go. What do you think? And I got a little bit of the sideways puppy dog face, like, what do you what? What do you do with this data? I’m like, that’s a really good question. It’s not very actionable, and if you spend enough time with it, maybe you could suss out some sort of insight, but it’s pretty painful. So

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  26:46  

granted, this was before, like, Corey had signed the contract we’re going in, we’re going to develop and like, Well, let’s find out what you had before. And it was a funny conversation.

Corey Reed – TCU  26:56  

Show it to you to be Yeah, so

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  26:58  

this is before. So, now let’s go to say, like, what does data look like that you can really use? And this is the analytics dashboard within SearchStax. So walk us through how you use this dashboard, Corey.

Corey Reed – TCU  27:13  

this is a little like, you know, zoomed in on a piece of it, right? There’s a lot of other interesting stuff in here, but this is great. I like how scannable it is. You can very quickly see what your search volumes look like, right? So total searches, searches with clicks. So how much engagement are you getting? What’s your click through? Rate search latency just tells you to make sure that you don’t have some sort of, you know, networking communication issue that you need to dig into, and then average click position is one that I really like to watch. It’s the one at the bottom left, and it basically tells you where, what’s the average position within the search results of the item that someone decided was most relevant to what they were looking for, and clicked on it right? So it’s really exciting to see that when it’s down, you know, below well below four, because that means we’re putting relevant matches right up there at the very top of the list of results. And then the other two charts you can keep an eye on. One is a graph of the click through rate over multiple days at a time, and then no result searches. So that tells you, as a percentage of the total search volume, how many of those basically result in dead ends.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  28:36  

So all of our dashboards are interactive, so we are just giving you a sneak peek today. We can’t click through into everything. But I think you said this once. Corey said this is snackable data. If I only have a few minutes to go to that old table you just showed us, isn’t going to do anything. I could spend a few minutes here and be like, oh, I need to dig into this. Or maybe I don’t. So, it’s great to see these bar these timelines right this over time, this data becomes more valuable. The trend, like your click through trend, is going the right way. 54 is incredible. We’ll talk about that in a second. The no results are going the right way, right? We want that to be going down. So in a snapshot, you kind of get something at least right, and then you can dig down a little deeper and find out what are the most popular searches. There’s that 54% click through rate again, and we look for you to start to set benchmarks like we know we’re a search experience company. We know that anything over 35% is incredible we’ve seen because we see, you know, clients tell us. And there we have that data, average cook position like Corey was saying, is it in the top three? 

People generally aren’t going to be going pages deep into your search. And how many searches per session are they? Are they conducting? So under three is generally ideal, and we’re not going to show this day, but you could dig down into these top search terms and say like, well, where people are searching for nursing, that’s at the top. But where are they going when they search for nursing? What’s kind. Coming up. So you can really dive into that data. But one of the most popular data points that we ought to have, that, I think, is not being used, utilized enough in many solutions, is no results, search data. And so what you’re looking at here is a snapshot of some of the no results searches taken from TCU at a certain point in time. So I want Corey to talk a little bit about this, because we can kind of spend a little time on things like, what do you do? Like, what does this mean? What are we looking at here with these terms? Corey,

Corey Reed – TCU  30:35  

so just know that I have no shame, that I’m willing to stand up here and show you, kind of some of my deep, deep dirt secrets, because you see the course catalog on here, and you’re like, What are you doing? Like, that’s it. I’m out. I’m hanging up on this webcast. We saw that, and there was a moment of panic, right? Oh, what in the world is going on? How’s that in the no results searches? And then I received an email saying, by the way, we switched our course catalog to a new vendor on a new subdomain, and it hadn’t been crawled. We weren’t linking to it. There was no, yeah, it was a little bit of a surprise architectural change, and I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know the timing. So we basically did a quick pivot and said, All right, let’s put together a promotion so someone searches for a course catalog. We’ll put the undergraduate link and the graduate Catalog link front and center, right there in the search until we get the new catalog crawled, right, and then it’ll fix itself organic.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  31:44  

I love that. That’s not a common one, but it’s great. Like, hey, this is, I’ll say for the first time here. Search can be your monitoring tool, but it’s, it’s can be used that way,

Corey Reed – TCU  31:55  

right? And, you know, there’s some interesting ones too, things like, how much is housing? That’s one that could be both a content marketing idea, right? Like, how let’s, let’s make sure that we’re using the right nomenclature, right? So no more room and board. Now it’s food and housing, making sure that we’re writing content that’s matching the kind of evolving language of people, what they’re searching for. And then some of these are just opportunities to try to connect some dots, right? So we don’t, we don’t have Japanese right now, but we do have Asian studies. We don’t have Japanese, but we do have Chinese. You know, we offer that as a minor there. There are some of these things. We don’t have civil engineering, but we have electrical and mechanical I have

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  32:46  

to ask you this, Corey, do you have a cyber technology degree?

Corey Reed – TCU  32:50  

We don’t. We don’t have a cyber technology degree, but we actually have some interesting research around a combination of criminology and some cyber security concepts out there. So we don’t have it, but we have some things that are related to it, and they just, they wouldn’t be direct synonyms, but it would be worth, yeah, redirecting some of those, or talking to our computer science department and say, Hey, we’re getting a lot of demand for cyber technology. What say you is that something we should develop? So

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  33:31  

Corey mentioned a couple of the features. Which one he mentioned was promotions. It’s a feature where you can say, we want this to come up to the top. Mentioned that earlier, but they just mentioned the synonyms. So synonyms can let you point a search to a different term, like you’re saying cyber technology goes to, I forget what degree it was there. But do you have any use cases where you see something on here? I’m like, gosh, we need to fill a content gap. Anything like that, sure.

Corey Reed – TCU  34:02  

I mean, obviously the course catalog was, was a big one, right? But then also things like cost per hour and in housing like, we want to make sure that that we were creating content that’s using terms that are that are meeting people’s expectations, because you try to, you know, use synonyms and things like that, but some of these, it might be a better solve if you just go write a quick blog post right, like, go to the Admissions Center has a pretty popular blog that they use, and so it’s a great way to influence their content marketing to Say, Hey, let’s write a blog post about how much is housing what does that look like? What are the new options? We just built two residence halls on East Campus. Like, could you write a blog post about that that kind of captures that kind of search query content and then also kind of builds on our story? Right? Yeah.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  35:00  

Yeah, so when we talk about no results, I sometimes get the question, well, why can’t AI just do all this like we’re in that world now, right? Well, we have a very practical view on AI at SearchStax, and it comes down to really believing we need a hybrid approach. You’ve probably still seen there’s a lot of hallucinations out there, and in higher ed the stakes are high. So we’ve been using AI for years, building with machine learning in the background from the start, we know search at the atomic level. So we need to continue to embrace these core search technologies and augment them with the LLMs, but keep that human intelligence as part of the process. And I’m going to show you a little example of why and how that is. But Corey, what’s, what’s your take on, on AI you’ve, you’ve been testing a little bit, I know,

Corey Reed – TCU  35:59  

right? Well, I mean, obviously it’s a hugely popular topic right now, right? And then you feel like AI has been enabled in everything from, you know, bars of soap to your toaster oven. And I think some of those make sense, and some of them are just wacky, right? They, they, they’re almost bordering on quackery where you’re like, I don’t, I don’t want that. I don’t want that in my, my, my bowl of cereal. Just keep your AI out of my cereal. I think there are some tools that blend the power of AI so it’s obviously tremendously capable at pattern matching, right? LLM. Llms, part of why they hallucinate right is because they’re expert at matching patterns. And they’re like, here’s the pattern that would be here, here’s a variation or an iteration that meets this pattern, right? And they don’t really care if it’s accurate or not, they’re just like it fits the pattern. So that’s great, but sometimes they get it horribly and laughably wrong. And so I think the tools that do it right are the ones that that couple the power and speed of AI with little bit of, you know, yeah, yeah, humans, let’s show

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  37:20  

them a little bit of what we’re talking about here, because we have a couple features here. One of them is smart match assists. That’s we’re gonna show, like, getting a sneak peek at into to eliminate searches with no results. So using AI to really generate these predictive responses. Like, what should this no result actually be? And then our most recent enhancement has been smart ranking. So using advanced language processing to really tune the results based on these deeper, deeper meanings. And I know Corey, you’ve been Smart Ranking is really new. We just barely kind of turned that on with TCU. So I’m not sure if you have much to talk about with that, but let’s go with this to the smart match assist, and this could be our first real reveal as to how this is working for you. These are some of the terms that we’ve taken right out of what you’re doing over there. And so what about if you not here? So

Corey Reed – TCU  38:15  

the way this works is, you know, after a couple of weeks of the robots listening in to what’s being searched. I can log in, and I can check the smart match assist tool, and it’ll tell me if it has recommendations or not. And so I get a list like this, and then I can run down and decide, do I want to connect these dots or not? Right? And it’s helpful that it gives me a reason on why it thinks these things should be connected or could be connected, but I don’t always want to do that. So things like Corey and Colby, right? We have people named Corey like me, but then we have Colby. Colby is the name of a hall right? Like it’s one of our named facilities, but I don’t think that that’s what they’re looking for. I can’t be confident that if they’re searching for something that could be a faculty member, could be a staff member, they probably aren’t looking for me, unless the website’s down, but they’re probably not looking for Colby, right? So I just, I wave that one off. But other ones are very helpful, like farming and agriculture. Okay, that makes sense, forensics, forensic science. That’s a pretty good match. This COVID fender all a FAFSA ID. I was like, I’m pretty sure that is a Spanish to English jump, but then I don’t think the Spanish is spelled correctly. So I think that is that

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  39:49  

would intrigue me. I’d never call out if they catch a Spanish typo. Yeah, right. So,

Corey Reed – TCU  39:55  

you know, I never, I never would have built that synonym. Never would have happened. And then class catalog, class schedule, that’s great. And then Calandra and calendars, right? They’re just some that I want to make. And then there are others that I have found, a few since we’ve been running this where I’m like, you know, I see in other contexts, right? With other organizations, you would want to serve matches for this term when someone searches for this one. But maybe at TC, we’re not ready to do that, right? Yeah? Because maybe our answer to that, yeah, extended search isn’t great. And

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  40:36  

What I really like to say about this is, like, when we were building this and I knew it was coming. I’m like, why don’t we just put it into the algorithm and make our search better, you know? And this is proof that we need human intelligence, because if that was the case, they’d all be green. And I’ve seen Corey show me like it’s not always green. We need to connect those dots. So starting with AI number one on the back end, rather than maybe the generative AI front end that everyone’s talking about is, number one, very, more strategic, and the way we’re doing it is very, very thought out. So it’s great to see how you’re using it. Corey, I think we’re going to go ahead and go to some takeaways here, and I wanted to leave you with a few things in that one is that if you remember three things, one is search is central to your user experience. And I just heard someone saying it’s not on their radar recently, but I’m gonna actually host another webinar next month about redesigns, and that really is all about this, is that how search is tied to redesigns and things like that, but it is central to user experience, and kind of rescue you. It also can support your strategic, strategic values. 

So we talked about that search for good TCU being one of those leaders. I’m seeing more schools that take control of those terms that can forward your institution’s mission too, and then these search data are valuable. It’s a place where your students and all of your audiences are telling you exactly what they’re looking for. So that’s going to conclude it, along with that third one, though, I’m going to make one quick announcement. We’re working on some original research around this. It’s pretty significant. We’re going to announce it in about six weeks or so. So stay tuned for that, and I’m going to go ahead and jump into the QA and see what we have. While I have the QA up, I’m going to put my contact slide up. And if anyone wants to book a meeting, I’d be happy to talk to you about your search, about your digital experience, anything, anything about your technology stack, those types of things. But feel free to contact us. We’ll jump into the questions here. Or bicycles. Bicycles, bicycles. Yeah, that would really get me if you really want the meeting. Well, I’m going to hand these to you. Corey, these look pretty we have, we have some good questions here. So how long does it take to get up and running? Corey, you’re able to answer that.

Corey Reed – TCU  42:50  

So yeah. So we took longer than it needed to take on the TCU side to get up and running. I feel like we could have had SearchStax up and running with the what, what you guys call the UX accelerator, kind of a, if you imagine, you log in, you configure some settings, right? It builds a drop in widget. You can be up and running in a couple days, right? And we had that running early, but we wanted some time to kind of test and see and make some metadata changes to our content, right? We were like, this is cool, but I think it’d be even better if we went and made, you know, cleaned up some metadata, kind of, you know, made a few tweaks, and then we think that overall the search data is going to be a lot better. So on the data side, we wanted to do a little bit of sprucing up before we launched. So it took us like three weeks to get going, but that was on us right? It could be a lot faster. And then we deployed our Custom Search, the one that we kind of walked everybody through, that took us about month, month to get that going. So three weeks in, we had the drag and drop, and then about a month later, we went live with version two, the custom version, perfect.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  44:12  

Thank you. Corey, another one here. You’ve touched on a little bit. Can you? Can you talk a bit about how SearchStax integrates with your CMS?

Corey Reed – TCU  44:21  

Sure. So what’s nice is because it’s, you know, platform agnostic. Search tech doesn’t really care what content it’s running on. So it’s been really nice as long as you’re CMS or you’re it could be flat HTML. It could be anything, right? It could be a single page application. Potentially, you just put it out there, and you can hit it with a crawler, and then see what that looks like. You can preview that data. And then if you need to make some metadata tweaks or some tagging tweaks, um. Yeah,

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  45:00  

it’s a modern campus, you said, and then you have some WordPress sites. A lot of schools have multiple CMSs. So, yeah, Corey, hit it right on the head. Like, we can either crawl it, or we can have some subsystems, have a direct we have direct integrations, but crawl it, or use an API, but often it’s being crawled daily. Yeah,

Corey Reed – TCU  45:19  

and you didn’t give you the option. I mean, you can do, you can do, you can hybrid that however you need to, which is nice, because even with us, with the crawler, we could still push stuff in if we wanted, right? So if we wanted to just push in through the API some supplemental data, we still have the ability to do that, which is pretty cool, I think. So. Thanks,

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  45:41  

Corey. Here’s another one. There’s kind of, it’s kind of a three part question. I’ll kind of break it down is, is it extra add-on services within SearchStax to have those tabs on the search or is it just part of the product? The quick answer is, it can be done as part of the product. It takes a little extra effort, but I think Corey’s team was up to it, get it. One person got it up in a couple of weeks or less. So it is pretty easy to build that. And this one, you can add on that to Corey, but I’ll throw this one at you. How do you get the programs in there?

Corey Reed – TCU  46:16  

Yeah, so for us, so we wrote the, we created a, basically a custom page type or a page template in modern campus, right? We defined it and said, All right, all of our program pages are going to use this style of page, this kind of markup. And then we were able to set some metadata tags and meta tags in the metadata that power those facets. So wherever we wanted a facet or a facet group, we’d create a meta tag, and then the different values that we want to make available within the facet, we expose those in the meta tag. And then you just, you can connect that behind the scenes in the little search UI to say, here’s the facet group. Here are the facet options, and it’ll allow you to then mix and match. It’s really, maybe sounds complicated, but once you look at it, if you have people that are comfortable with HTML, right? I’m pretty confident, regardless of which CMS you have, they could, they could get the facet stuff to work.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  47:29  

Thanks. Corey, here’s a comment that says, I love the map in search. Are there any concerns about accessibility, mobile responsiveness? How do you address them? If you  any of those, yeah,

Corey Reed – TCU  47:43  

so all of our stuff’s designed to be responsive. And you know, it’s always interesting when you have iframes and you’re trying to get that to play nice with a small viewport. So just through testing, I mean, that piece of the integration was on us, like how we control that? So the other combination is kind of working with the concept 3d folks, you know, because it’s their app being iFramed in. So we just try to make sure that there’s we for small screens. We make the map as large as it can be in the viewport, so that we don’t, you know, have stuff that’s scroll and you have to do a lot of pinch and zoom to get to it, and then we just provide content. We push as hard as we can to make all the content that we expose on the front end accessible in different formats, right? So that it’s easier and as accessible as we can make it.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  48:44  

Thanks. Corey, here’s a good one that I can I want to follow up with, but I want to throw it to you first. Corey, do you have any data to show how changes TCU has made to its search have led to increased applications and enrollments? Or how about within individual schools and colleges within TCU,

Corey Reed – TCU  49:01  

I we haven’t parsed it out to individual colleges and schools within the university, but we have seen increases in our conversion funnels, right? So funneling people to our inquiry page, our campus visit page, and our, you know, application funnel, we have seen those. We have seen an increase in that. And you can see, you can see in the search data, now that we have good search data to review, you can see the sort of admission related searches. And you know where those land, and then are they being clicked through on, or are they no result searches? So we don’t have super great before and after data. It’s not super clean because our search analytics before was so i. Difficult to understand.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  50:01  

The hard thing about it is, to do a real test, you have to get data, you have to change one thing, and then you have to get the data. So that’s really hard to do. And I can, I have an example of a school who’s done this, and so what you’re getting into is this other question I’ll answer at the same time, is about ROI. How do you get that ROI like we have no budget? How do I convince someone that we need this so we get into like, what if you tracked applications for admissions, requests for welcome packets or orientation sign ups? I know a school that did that, then all they did was change their search. They enhanced their search. 

They saw over a $2 million investment or a return on investment within two years after that, which changed their search. So it’s hard to do, but also calls to your service desk, like, hey, if we incorporate, if we reduce our search, will our service desk volume go down? Um, that doesn’t go into your aroma. Question for TCU, but some ways to like, look at ROI, it’s challenging, but it’s possible. Here’s another one. Is it meant to replace Google powered search integration, or work alongside Google Search Console? I asked to scope the CMS integration and it is all configured with Google right now. We’re often the replacement for Google, like Google, the Google Search Console. So it used to be called Google Custom Search, Google programmable search. Hey, I don’t know if you have much experience with Google. Corey. Do you want to take a shot

Corey Reed – TCU  51:29  

at this one? Yeah, so we, I keep an eye on Search Console. So we haven’t we, we use Google Search Appliance

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  51:38  

before that, before 2017, or 16,

Corey Reed – TCU  51:41  

right? It was basically the end of life, right? When I hired on. So hey, Corey, welcome. This is broken. This is the new thing we’re doing that no one understands. Hey, great, thanks. But we still pay a lot of attention to Google Search Console, and what’s interesting is comparing the two, right? If I look at data from Search Console, right? So this is all people using google.com, and then coming in, and then I use, look at people using Site Search qualitatively. It’s different stuff, right? It’s, there’s, they’re using the two tools for distinct purposes, which I think is really interesting. And so I think you would miss something if you’re effectively using the same algorithm for both of those, because the users expect them to be different. Jeff, you and I haven’t really gotten into that a whole lot, but it is really interesting to see, it’s all really generic, like branded stuff that comes in through the search console for us, and it’s all unbranded, very specific, granular stuff when they’re on site. And so I think the two could work in tandem.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  52:58  

you’re right. Corey, it’s all about effort, like, how much effort, I know Google programmable search, which is the newest, you know, free version of Google out there. You know, there is some flexibility, but I don’t see many schools that have the resources that are doing much with it, so it’s this very plain out of the box implementation. There is some flexibility. And I know you cannot Google, Visual Data Studio and do all the things you can do really, some cool stuff with any product. What we’re doing here at search X is really like the efficient way to really productize a higher ed solution, which there’s this other question here. I’m not going to probably get to it, how do we stack up to a competitor? I’m not going to mention the competitor, but in this case, we’re higher ed focused, like that is our real target right now. So it’s you kind of have to know the data sources, like the APIs we’re working with, with these different calendars and even directory integration information. So quick, long winded answer to that one, but let’s see what else we got here. I think that’s about it. I think we’ve covered it all. Any other last questions we have coming in? I think we’re right on time too. So give you five minutes to spare. Oh, wait, one more is the search tax dashboard configurable and Corey. Have you customized your dashboard?

Corey Reed – TCU  54:27  

I have not customized my dashboard. I really like the way that it works, and there’s more to it, right? So we’re just showing you kind of you’re getting to look through a keyhole at the dashboard. So there are a lot of other helpful breakout tools. And like, you know, drill down the kind of tools that are in there. I haven’t found a need, really, to try to customize it. And what’s nice is I have shared the data with a number of my colleagues that have. Different, you know, whose roles have different levels of technical proficiency, right? And the dashboard makes sense to non technical folks and technical folks alike. You know, the nerds can nerd out on it, and the non nerds can be like, Oh, that makes sense. Okay, so I understand what’s going on, and you don’t have to translate for me.

Jeff Dillon – SearchStax  55:25  

Okay, well, I’m going to close it out with that, and I want to thank Corey first for spending the time with us that was really fun. And everybody for whoever stayed the whole for the whole webinar, and thanks again. Bye, bye, everybody. Bye.