Forrester Groundswell Awards Submission

• Name of entry: Baynote Brings Crowd Wisdom to the Internet's #1 Wedding Destination—The Knot
• Name of company entering: Baynote
• Category: SUPPORTING

Short description of this entry (What it is and how it works.)

With over 3.2 million unique monthly visitors hunting for wedding planning advice, The Knot is the Internet's number one wedding destination.

Earlier this year, The Knot teamed up with Baynote to power social search and product recommendations for its flagship site TheKnot.com. Now, The Knot is able to leverage the collective wisdom of its customer community to improve the relevancy of on-site search results and provide valuable recommendations based on visitors' intent, not their past behavior or clickstream data. This has resulted in increased page views to support its advertising revenue stream, cross-selling of products, and improved shopping experiences for customers.

Visitors to the site are shown relevant articles and products that map directly to their search query. This creates a more holistic experience where, for example, a bride may find answers to etiquette questions around favors at the same time she can buy the ones that meet her unique needs.

By leveraging the wisdom of the community of brides-to-be with similar questions or tastes, The Knot has continued to take its commitment to being a one-stop wedding resource to the next level.

How does this entry accomplish business goals?

Through its partnership with Baynote, The Knot is able to tap into the collective wisdom of its customers. This allows the site to automatically display the best content and products, thus increasing online revenue, leads and impressions.

The Knot has seen a 70% lift in average page views per session and a 54% lift in customer engagement minutes for those visitors using the Baynote-powered search results and product recommendations. Likewise Baynote users on The Knot's Wedding Shop have generated a 19% net revenue increase, even more during certain promotional periods.

Occasionally, there can be a disconnect between a product and the way shoppers search for it. Earlier this year, the shop carried a tealight holder shaped like an Adirondack chair. Many people misspelled the term, and results suffered. But Baynote was able to flag a "product gap" and allowed merchandisers to instantly "pin" search results to make sure the product was found using even misspelled words, a process that would have previously involved IT and taken a week.

Beyond basic web analytics, Baynote enables The Knot to visualize its community of website visitors in ways never before possible—allowing them to see emerging clusters of like-minded peers, understand the content and products that are leading to conversion, and visualize gaps on the website that should be plugged.