Ciena's Cory Reed on Improving Lead Generation Through Optimized Site Search and Analytics
June 9, 2010 By Heather Fletcher
Businesses and their customers have something in common with comedian Patton Oswalt. In a rant about Star Wars prequels, Oswalt yells that he doesn't care where the stuff he loves comes from, "I just love the stuff I love!"
The same is true for a lot of companies that just want their Web speed to stay fast and their software to work, no matter how business changes. Linthicum, Md.-based network infrastructure provider Ciena promises to make that happen and recently, search service provider SLI Systems of Cupertino, Calif. did something similar for Ciena.
Ciena noticed its site visitors weren't becoming leads. So in August 2007, the company tasked SLI with improving customer engagement and lead generation through improved site search and analytics. (One of the first challenges, for instance, was integrating site search with Omniture software that was collecting website metrics for Ciena.)
As of May 1, 2010, Ciena has seen 18.5 percent of site search users register and download files. That's a much higher lead rate than the 4 percent of unguided visitors who download files. Plus, the newly search engine-optimized pages could be tracked from the Web directly to 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations, the latter of which became leads.
Cory Reed, Ciena's Web marketing manager, explains more about the solution that's bringing site searchers results they want without having to wade through other, unwanted information. In other words, they're finding the Darth Vaders instead of the Anakin Skywalkers.
Target Marketing: How did Ciena discover that site visitors weren't finding the product information they wanted and, therefore, weren't becoming leads?
Cory Reed: ... We noticed ... that the abandonment rate was high on our search results pages. So people were searching for a particular topic in our field and they were obviously not finding what they were looking for, because they were leaving [our] site from the search results page and not going deeper by clicking on a results link. So that was one of the things that showed us that it was not working, period.
TM: The lead generation techniques—white papers, product data sheets, videos and webinars—involve a form. How has this changed?
CR: I would say this hasn't changed quite as much as some of the other aspects after we implemented SLI. ... We typically offer the videos without requiring any kind of registration information. But our site is primarily about lead generation, so we are still gating the white papers and webinars. Data sheets aren't gated, either. But what we found after SLI was that those white papers and data sheets are actually showing up in the [on-site] search results pages. Where we were getting abandonment beforehand, people are actually going through and registering after searching on the topic. ...
The same is true for a lot of companies that just want their Web speed to stay fast and their software to work, no matter how business changes. Linthicum, Md.-based network infrastructure provider Ciena promises to make that happen and recently, search service provider SLI Systems of Cupertino, Calif. did something similar for Ciena.
Ciena noticed its site visitors weren't becoming leads. So in August 2007, the company tasked SLI with improving customer engagement and lead generation through improved site search and analytics. (One of the first challenges, for instance, was integrating site search with Omniture software that was collecting website metrics for Ciena.)
As of May 1, 2010, Ciena has seen 18.5 percent of site search users register and download files. That's a much higher lead rate than the 4 percent of unguided visitors who download files. Plus, the newly search engine-optimized pages could be tracked from the Web directly to 7,000 downloads and 800 registrations, the latter of which became leads.
Cory Reed, Ciena's Web marketing manager, explains more about the solution that's bringing site searchers results they want without having to wade through other, unwanted information. In other words, they're finding the Darth Vaders instead of the Anakin Skywalkers.
Target Marketing: How did Ciena discover that site visitors weren't finding the product information they wanted and, therefore, weren't becoming leads?
Cory Reed: ... We noticed ... that the abandonment rate was high on our search results pages. So people were searching for a particular topic in our field and they were obviously not finding what they were looking for, because they were leaving [our] site from the search results page and not going deeper by clicking on a results link. So that was one of the things that showed us that it was not working, period.
TM: The lead generation techniques—white papers, product data sheets, videos and webinars—involve a form. How has this changed?
CR: I would say this hasn't changed quite as much as some of the other aspects after we implemented SLI. ... We typically offer the videos without requiring any kind of registration information. But our site is primarily about lead generation, so we are still gating the white papers and webinars. Data sheets aren't gated, either. But what we found after SLI was that those white papers and data sheets are actually showing up in the [on-site] search results pages. Where we were getting abandonment beforehand, people are actually going through and registering after searching on the topic. ...
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