A year in Pi and what’s next for 2019…

Every year, search gets taken a little more seriously, and no more so than in 2018. With GDPR and personal data crackdowns, search has come into its own as a source of scaled consumer intelligence that doesn’t overstep the ‘Creepy line’.

More and more businesses are turning to search data for consumer insight.

2018: The year Search Intelligence became Business Intelligence

At Pi, we’ve been innovating all year long to ensure we capture the biggest share of consumer behaviour data, with the greatest depth of structured insight, to hand over to our customers.

Along the way, we’ve:

• Helped global leisure companies inform million pound acquisitions when entering into new markets
• Supported publications in winning new business and dominating search during major retail events like Black Friday
• Enabled the digital transformation of a traditional high street fashion retailer, which saw them surpass major online-only brands to own UK fashion

*pause for breath*

And there’s more! Read on to see what else we’ve got up to in 2018, plus what’s next for 2019.

Elevate Brighton

"When it comes to SEO, it's not just about the technical. What's most important is to understand the 'Beyond'. The opportunities, new markets and customer insight that search data offers us." #Preach@scopey123@PiDatametrics#ElevateBrightonpic.twitter.com/zs8AxsQo0P

— Louise Linehan (@Lou_Linehan) September 27, 2018

There is no doubt in the collective Pi Community mind that search intelligence equates to decision making power across the business.

But, just so there were no misunderstandings, this year we launched Elevate Brighton - our twice yearly event on BrightonSEO eve - to take search beyond SEO, and prove just how valuable it can be to businesses.

Pi Market Intelligence

This year we also launched our new and improved Pi Market Intelligence platform, which turns search data into business metrics and visualisations that can be understood across the whole organisation.

This information powers forecasting online, offline, and in departments far beyond the SEO team.

Plus, it’s helped us at Pi to spot some exciting new sector trends and insight to share with you:

Pi Market Performance Reports:

• Food & beverages
• Black Friday 2018
• Fashion retail
• Weather and retail search trends
• Global automotive

Pi Market Leaders

Taking inspiration from none other than Top of The Pops, in 2018 we launched our Pi Market Leader Leaderboards to show the top players, movers and shakers dominating their industry’s.

Showing share of voice across thousands of websites and searches, as well as performance trended over time, we’ve seen major retailers nosedive in Fashion, marketplaces climb the rankings in Homeware, and a ‘Paradox of choice’ scenario in Electricals, where the majority of the market is owned by one major holding company.

Keep your eyes peeled for our newly updated quarterly leaderboards in 2019, via Retail Week, The Telegraph and Statista. We’ll be adding Gambling, Beauty, Finance, Publishers, FMCGs, Telecoms and Automotive to the mix.

*another pause for breath*

Rapid Tracking

It’s no secret that the search landscape is constantly changing - even down to the hour. To give our customers full visibility of their content, we’ve created Rapid Tracking: A full feature analysis of page one in search, which updates every two hours.

Tracking the success of campaigns and ownership of rich content assets in the SERPs has never been easier. Customers can spot patterns in how search results are served to inform their content strategy, understand their relative dominance in the features that fuel voice search - such as Answer Cards - and get deeper insight into customer behaviour patterns.

What to watch out for in 2019…

2019 is going to be a big year for everyone in the Pi Community!

We’re giving you Daily, Weekly and Monthly decision making power
No other search solution provides the depth of daily search intelligence that Pi does. But, in 2019 we’re scaling up even further to showcase daily, weekly and monthly views across the entire Pi solution. This, combined with our new 2 hourly Rapid Tracking feature, means we are the only enterprise search solution with the flexibility of four tracking frequencies.

Our innovations ensure that you have access to the right frequency of data, for the right objective.

Setup daily workspaces to track cannibalisation, weekly workspaces to explore the performance of evergreen content, and monthly views to run your top-level Pi Market Intelligence reports - there’s no need to use up all of your data quota by running on daily! This update will give you complete control over your data usage, help you to achieve total spend efficiency and enable to meet all of your reactive and strategic objectives.

We’re teaming up with Pricesearcher
Developing a pricing strategy that is both competitive and lucrative is no mean feat - and, choosing the right products to discount or inflate is even trickier. Combining consumer search trend insight with pricing data from Pricesearcher, we will show you how best to inform your retail pricing strategy, to win out against your competitors, take on marketplace pricing and achieve the greatest commercial return.

We’re giving you Story & Category Engines, to bring search to life for the whole business
Time and time again we’ve seen the opportunity in search being missed, as the right meaningful data fails to get in front of those with decision making power.

We think it’s about time that changed.

Using AI and Natural Language intelligence, in 2019 we’re bringing you the Pi Story Engine to empower you to tell different stories and influence decisions throughout the business, with insights customised entirely to your intended audience.

But that’s not all. We’re also devising a super intelligent Category Engine which will automatically learn, discover and categorise searches into business relevant industries, to help you find the best insight, for creating the most valuable business decisions.

We're collecting Baidu search volume data

We're currently collecting and experimenting with Baidu search volume data, with the intent to increase your knowledge and insight of the forever expanding Chinese Market. (Single's Day anybody?)

2018: That’s a wrap

We’d like to thank all of you in the Pi Community for making this year a roaring success!

If you’re not yet a fully-fledged member, but want to get your hands on a piece of Pi, then don’t hesitate to get in touch. We’ll happily discuss anything and everything covered above.