Featured Content
Featured Content is an embedded merchandising solution that allows content owners to highlight different products, services or content, based on their business drivers and objectives. It provides an easy-to-use GUI that allows site owners to define a set of rules for displaying content that is customized to users’ requests.
User requests are search-based triggers and can be a combination of any of the following:
- Keywords
- Navigators
- Categories
- User profiles
Featured Content enables content to be grouped into templates which can comprise any combination of the following elements: URL, HTML or indexed content. The templates mean that merchandisers can provide differentiated user experiences. This is due to many possible combinations in the templates, since they can be tailored specifically to each owner’s unique business requirements. The templates are also flexible enough to allow the results views to change dynamically over time or as user behaviour changes.
The effectiveness of Featured Content relies on a good understanding of the users’ intentions. In practice, this means bridging the gap between what users are really looking for and the search terms they choose to find it.
Some examples of Featured Content in action include:
- Alternate result sets by displaying content that is a business match for the user’s query rather than a linguistic match (for example, the user searches for “MacBook” and rather than receiving zero hits, the query returns an alternate result set of selected “Sony” laptops.)
- Messages or calls to action (for example, the user searches for “corporate updates” and a message indicates that “CEO will be speaking in the Main Hall @ 9AM.”)
Source: FAST ESP Brochure 2007