Turning potential customers into real ones: NIVEA rolls out Google Search Appliance

Posted by Felix Müller, International Digital Marketing Manager, Beiersdorf AG

Editor's note: Our guest blogger is Felix Müller, International Digital Marketing Manager at Beiersdorf AG, a global leader in skin care with headquarters in Hamburg, Germany.

Skin care has been our core expertise for 130 years. From our headquarters in Germany, we at Beiersdorf AG market one of the world’s most successful skin care brands: NIVEA. In order to move forward in an industry that we've been in for a long time, it’s important for us to have a finger on the pulse of the market and focus on the ever-changing needs of our customers. Today, more of our customers are using the Internet to find our products and we wanted to make that an easy experience for them.

Google Search Appliance offers visitors to our websites a significantly enhanced experience. It is a scalable hardware solution that offers a Google-like search experience for our public NIVEA websites worldwide. For our users, it offers the same kind of easy, fast and relevant search experience that they know from Google.com, while our company benefits from complete flexibility and control over the online user search experience. That is a great help to us, particularly when it comes to turning potential customers into real ones. We have now rolled out the Google Search Appliance globally for a total of 74 conventional and 12 mobile, country-specific websites of the NIVEA brand.

Google Search Appliance has personalized and improved the visitors’ experience on NIVEA websites: when searching for products, they receive country-specific suggestions and results that also adapt based on patterns in the respective market. For example, if a site visitor in Germany starts his or her search with "de", the first suggestion he or she will see is “deo ohne aluminium”, while the same query in France will suggest “devenir testeuse nivea”. So that the search process actually yields successful results, searches in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, German, Dutch and Arabic are supported by extensive features such as integrated thesaurus and an automatic, self-learning spellcheck function. The upshot is that the Google technology now makes it a whole lot easier for our customers to search for content that is relevant to them.

See what other companies that use Google Search Appliance have to say.