Community owners and managers always think of hosting the best possible content on community. The best possible content takes different forms. Sometimes it can be official company information and company news, other times it’s event information, news items, new products, reviews. Great content is unique for every brand.
From time to time, you might want specific community content to display at the top of the search results list when users search for specific keywords or phrases.
With Promoted Search in 18.12, you can now associate specific searches to specific community posts to boost specific pieces of content to the top of the search results list.
The content could be any Community content; from an Accepted Solution for a high visibility product issue to announcing a new product launch to publicizing an upcoming company conference.
Some examples of what you can accomplish with Promoted Search include:
- Promote company response to a product question – When your brand knows the conversation around your products, you are often in the best position to provide the best answer for a product question. Boost this content in the search results. For example, if a user searches for a particular printer issue, you might want to highlight a specific result at the top of the search results list. This will be the best resource on this specific printer query.
- Announce news – Announce company or product news using Promoted Search to provide more visibility. When you launch a new product variant or a new pricing, surface it to users when they search for related products. For example, if a user searches for “wireless hub”, it benefits her, as well as the brand, if she sees a company-written post on “Latest in technology - wi-fi hub A110 launched”.
- Surface documentation, newsletters - Usually the best time to show company-issued guides, documentation, how-to articles is when users seek help for setting up devices.
- Publicise events – Broaden your audience for upcoming events. Set a wide range of keywords in your Promoted Search rules so that your events, e.g. customer conferences, reach a maximum audience.
How does it work?
Promoted Search is built on the principle that the community owner knows which is the best content to boost and in context of which search terms. The set of rules that you set up to show Promoted Search results are key to that.
Extending the above example where your brand launched the cutting-edge technology wi-fi hub. A promoted search rule that you might set would be:
Screenshot - promoted search rule in admin dashboard
What this translates to is:
If search query contains <keyword>, then show the <content link>
And the community end-user experience looks like this:
Screenshot: Promoted Search Results in Community
If you don’t want to include the “Recommended” label on your Promoted Search results, you can omit it. This way, your Promoted Search results will merge with the organic results and not seem different. If you want to use a different label, we provide you with a few options.
You can read more details about Promoted Search in our release notes.
We want to hear how you are using Promoted Search to create more value for your customers. Please share your ideas on how you are implementing Promoted Search in your community, and feel free to ask any questions or provide feedback below.
