What is Click Tracking in EPiServer Find?

When a customer performs a search and subsequently clicks a search result, your website should be informing Find of this event.

Why is Click Tracking important?

There are two fundamental reasons:

• Quality of search results returned from Find
• Using statistics for continuous search optimisation

Find Relevancy Scores

The EPiServer Find algorithm will assign a relevancy score to each search result it deems to match the words in the search query. Search results are then by default ordered by the relevancy score.

Some of the factors taken into account in the EPi Find algorithm are as follows:

• Boost Weighting: the weighting you assign to fields in your search query. For example your query may stipulate that matches in the “Title” field are should be twice as relevant as the same matches in the “Description” field
• Term Frequency: number of occurrences of search term words within a result
• Inverse Frequency: measurement of how frequently words in a search term occur across the entire set of results. Words in the search query which occur in many potential results have a lower impact to the relevancy score than rare words across the result set.
• Number of keyword matches:search results which match all of the keywords in a search term will rank higher than those that match a subset

However a major part of how the EPi Finds algorithm assigns relevancy is the intelligence the platform gathers on click throughs. Search results that customers are frequently clicking for a search term will be assigned higher relevancy scores.

Find needs to know what results people are clicking.

Statistics

You’re marketing team should be using the Find Search Statistics interface to continually optimise results using Best Bets, Related queries, Synonyms and Autocomplete.

The cornerstone of this process is solid reporting.

If Click Tracking is not working, all search results will have a Click-through rate of 0% denying your marketing team of very valuable information.

Does Click Tracking not work out of the box?

If you’re using EPiServer Find Unified Search – Yes. Just enable Tracking on the search query. As long as you are injecting the EPi Client Resources in your root template (which you probably are!), then the JS injected handles all the rest.

If you’re not using Unified Search – No, you should read on…

How do i implement custom click tracking?

This excellent post from Henrik Fransas explains adding custom click tracking excellently:

https://world.episerver.com/blogs/Henrik-Fransas/Dates/2015/2/how-to-do-custom-query-and-click-tracking-with-episerver-find/

The only thing i will add is that sometimes we need to use the Find GetResult method to query the index. The GetResult methods supports returning extended data on the content type which we can set up in an initialisation module as follows with the MyCustomExtendedProperty() method being an simple static extension of the BaseProduct class.

[InitializableModule]
[ModuleDependency(typeof(EPiServer.Web.InitializationModule))]
public class SearchIndexInitialization : IInitializableModule
{
public void Initialize(InitializationEngine context)
{
SearchClient.Instance.Conventions.ForInstancesOf()
.IncludeField(x => x.MyCustomExtendedProperty());
}

public void Uninitialize(InitializationEngine context)
{
//Add uninitialization logic
}
}

Using GetResult the following method will add the HitId and HitType properties to your search results view model. I hope it comes in useful for someone!

public List AddStatisticsAndRelevancyToSearchResults(SearchResults searchResult) where T : ISearchResultViewModel
{
var searchResultsWithRelevancyScore = searchResult.Hits.Select(x =>
{
try
{
var result = _contentLoader.Get(x.Document.ContentLink);
x.Document.HitId = SearchClient.Instance.Conventions.IdConvention.GetId(result);
x.Document.HitType = SearchClient.Instance.Conventions.TypeNameConvention.GetTypeName(result.GetType());
}
catch (Exception e)
{
_logger.Error("Error thrown retrieving hit count from Find", e);
}
x.Document.RelevancyScore = x.Score;
return x.Document;
}).ToList();
return searchResultsWithRelevancyScore;
}