rethinking faceted navigation for online marketing (2008)
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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)
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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)
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Model the web site as a semilattice
All web site content
{ FV1 } { FVi } { FVn }
Article1 Articlem
{ FVj }
{ FVi, FVj } { FVi, FVn }
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Article page
Content
See more
by(facet)
Title
Comments
CTA
CTA
CTA
Learn moreabout(topic)
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Facet Values Visualization
Related articles page
Articles
CTA
CTA
CTA
Learn moreabout(topic)
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Visitor Visualization
Topic page
Articles
CTA
CTA
CTA
Editorialcontent
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
Impact on scalability
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
• 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?
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
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)
Copyright © 2008 Siderean Software, Inc. All rights reserved.