Yext’s Spring 2017 Release Unlocks Powerful New Insights and Tools for Brand Engagement

Global digital knowledge management provider Yext, today announced it's bringing customer engagement into new focus with its Spring 2017 release.

As intelligent search empowers consumers to find and engage with brands in new ways, understanding and optimizing how a brand appears across the web requires deep comprehensive analysis — and an entirely new approach. As part of the Spring 2017 release, Yext has redesigned its next-generation Analytics platform in order to arm businesses with the metrics they need to tackle this challenge, and has added four new features to drive customer interaction and give businesses even more control over their brands across the web.

The Spring 2017 release includes:

• A completely reimagined Analytics offering with new engagement insights across Yext Listings and Yext Pages
• The new Intelligent Search Tracker feature, which shows businesses the full picture of their performance in, and control over, the intelligent search landscape
• Enhanced Scheduled Updates functionality
• Support for diverse Calls-to-Action on Facebook location Pages
• An extension of Yext's Publisher Suggestions feature to Yelp listings

Yext Analytics brings these consumer interactions to light, giving businesses unprecedented insight into how customers engage with them everywhere online. It also reveals engagement metrics on Google, Facebook, and 100+ other third-party publishers, displaying them all in one comprehensive view.

"Brands don't just live on a business's website anymore," said Marc Ferrentino, Yext Chief Strategy Officer. "They are defined across 100+ different maps, apps, voice search tools, digital assistants, search engines, GPS systems, and social networks. This means that consumers are engaging with brands in places the business may not be aware of — and certainly can't track or measure. So these consumer touchpoints have gone unreported and underleveraged. With Yext Analytics, we're empowering brands to see and measure those drivers of consumer interaction far beyond their websites."

Brands have historically had no way to measure consumer engagement in the aggregate on many of these portals and could not see how it contributed to their bottom lines.

"Our customers have found that succeeding in the age of intelligent search requires intelligent analysis," said Jon Kennell, Yext VP of Product. "We rebuilt Yext Analytics to tackle a long-standing pain point for businesses — measuring consumer engagement across a scattered and expansive ecosystem of digital services. This release gives businesses a single, consolidated view of the analytics they were previously measuring individually — like data from Facebook — alongside performance data from our PowerListings® Network publishers, which they could never analyze before."

Yext Analytics brings clarity to the impact of brand engagement everywhere it happens. Reimagined from the ground up, Yext Analytics allows brands to:

• See a single view of engagement and interactions everywhere their brands appear. View engagement — from how many people see your brand, to how many click to Get Directions and more — across Yext Pages on brands' own websites, as well as Yext Listings, by unifying data from a variety of disparate sources, including Google My Business and Facebook, with data only available via Yext's proprietary PowerListings® Network integrations. And, with Search Terms, businesses can see the terms for which their Pages appear to consumers in intelligent search results, all directly within the Yext dashboard.

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• Assess their true performance in the new era of intelligent search.
  In a world where Google displays information directly in the Knowledge Graph, and where voice searches produce only one result, looking at how a brand ranks in organic search results no longer paints a full picture of its performance. Yext's new Intelligent Search Tracker feature allows businesses to measure not just their rankings, but the control they have over all the knowledge consumers see about them across the search ecosystem.

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• Share actionable data with colleagues and customers.
  With new Dashboards and reports customizable for CMOs, franchisees, social media managers, agencies, and more, Yext Analytics makes it easier than ever to give colleagues at every level of the organization insight into brand performance.

  

In addition to the reimagined Analytics Dashboard, Yext has made the following enhancements to the Yext Knowledge Engine as part of the Spring 2017 release:

• Scheduled Updates make it easier than ever for brands to optimize digital knowledge.
  All businesses are dynamic, and the facts consumers seek about them — like hours of operation, seasonal menu items, or special offers — often change on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. With enhanced Scheduled Updates from Yext, brands can manage this complexity at scale. Scheduled Updates are now enabled for every field in the Yext platform. With this update, retailers can add their seasonal promotions in one go for the entire year, restaurants can add seasonal cover photos the moment they're finalized, and hotels can view how their profiles will appear during the summer holiday season — at any time of year.

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• Facebook Calls-to-Action offer new opportunities to drive revenue and engagement.
  Businesses who manage their Facebook location Pages with Yext can now set Calls-to-Action — including Call Now, Book Now, and Sign Up — on those pages, directly from the Yext platform. Engagement data from these CTAs will appear in Yext Analytics, so users can get a full picture of how much engagement and revenue their local Facebook presence drives for their business (at zero cost-per-click).

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• Extended to Yelp, Publisher Suggestions gives brands even more control.
  Sites like Google and Yelp always want to confirm that the information they show about businesses, like business hours, website, and phone number, is complete and accurate. To do so, they allow consumers to suggest edits to this data. These consumer suggestions can help brands maintain the most accurate profiles possible, but they can also cause confusion if they turn out to be incorrect. Now available for Yelp listings, Yext's popular Publisher Suggestions feature lets businesses view consumer suggestions and choose to accept or reject them — all while retaining full control of their brand presence. Available since April 2016 for Google My Business listings, Publisher Suggestions has surfaced over 3.5 million consumer suggestions to date, helping more than 60,000 businesses maintain accurate profiles while also retaining control of their brand information.

"Brands need comprehensive insights and full control over how they appear and perform on all the digital services consumers use," added Ferrentino. "Today's release is a big leap forward and brings consumer engagements into clear focus."

The features listed above are now available in beta for Yext users. For more information about Yext Analytics and the other features in the Spring 2017 product release, request a demo or sign up for our webinar on March 23rd. Yext Partner? Sign up for the webinar here.