Rethinking Faceted Navigation for Online Marketing (2008)

Rethinking Faceted Navigation For Online Marketing

September 2008

New rules

• People get to your site from Google– By following paid or organic links

• The visitor goes straight to a landing page

• The goal is to get them to characterize and then identify themselves– By answering a call to action

Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

This changes a basic assumption of faceted navigation

Tired: drive traffic to start page, users zoom in

Wired: drive traffic to landing page, users zoom out then back in

Home page

Landing page(article)


We can refactor faceted navigation to accommodate this shift

• Zooming out from a landing page replaces zooming in from a start page– Because the user starts from (roughly) where

they want to be, we can make assumptions about their interests immediately

• Still faceted, but presentation and representation can be radically different than the norm


Faceted navigation supports two ways to zoom out

FV1FV2

…FVn

Article(depth = n)

“Learn more about {facet value} …”Topic page(depth = 1)

“See more by {facet} …”Related articles page

(depth = n - 1)


FV1FV2

…FVn

FV1FV2

…FVn

Use standard facets/attributes for personalization + categorization• People are

characterized by:– Perspectives– Goals (= Problems )– Preconditions ( =

Constraints)– Decision making phases

• R&D• Downselecting vendor• Preapproval• Committed

• Content is characterized by:– Genres– Dates– Sources– Named entities

• Concepts• Persons• Organizations• Events• Places• Objects

– Popularity– Ranking– Marketing programs


Model the web site as a semilattice

All web site content

{ FV1 } { FVi } { FVn }

Article1 Articlem

{ FVj }

{ FVi, FVj } { FVi, FVn }


Collapse the semilattice by removing intermediate nodes

Topic page1 Topic pagei Topic pagen

Article1 Articlem

Topic pagej

Related articles pagei,j Related articles pagei,n


Add edges between topic and article pages

Topic page1 Topic pagei Topic pagen

Article1 Articlem

Topic pagej

Related articles pagei,j Related articles pagei,n


Article page

Content

See more

by(facet)

Title

Comments

CTA

CTA

CTA

Learn moreabout(topic)


Facet Values Visualization

Related articles page

Articles

CTA

CTA

CTA

Learn moreabout(topic)


Visitor Visualization

Topic page

Articles

CTA

CTA

CTA

Editorialcontent


Impact on nimbleness

• Effort reduced to three steps– Upload/bookmark and tag content

• Learn to predict tags and visitor characteristics – Bin tags into facets– Create ads to drive traffic to landing pages

• Visualization becomes automatic– Related article visualization automatically mapped to facet

• E.g., place = Gmap, date = timeline, subject = streamgraph– Topic visualization automatically generated from usage and

visitor characteristics• “Who’s interested in this topic?”

– We can even provide visualization of collapsed semilattice as tripartite graph in 3D


Impact on scalability


• All pages can be precomputed and cached– Collapsing eliminates combinatorial explosion

of expensive-to-compute intermediate nodes– # pages to cache ≤ (# articles * (# facets + 1))

+ # topics • Can punt on free text search

– Use Google/Yahoo/MSN instead• Isn’t that how visitors got there in the first place?

Impact on easiness

• All pages relevant to a landing page are two clicks away– Modulo paging and ranking

• Loss of fine-grained zoom– Can be restore by not collapsing semilattice, at cost of

ability to precompute and cache all pages• Can we expand approach to accommodate:

– Hierarchical facets?– Pivoting?


Impact on driving action

• CTA on every page– Appropriate to context and visitor characteristics– The need to fill out a form is reduced to providing

contact information (email, phone, handle)• Page metadata provides implicit user characterization

• Every page SEO’d– Easy to crawl– Easy to optimize– All original content (if site specific to one customer)


Date post:	07-Nov-2014
Category:	Technology
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Rethinking Faceted Navigation for Online Marketing (2008)

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