Apr 1, 2023

AI-powered search & recommendations

By Rishin Banker

Head of Product

Summary

Maven is releasing AI-powered search, recommendations, affiliate links, and more.

🤖AI-powered recommendations

We launched personalized recommendations to make it easier for students to find relevant courses. The algorithm takes into account the students’ profile (e.g. job title, company, enrollments, waitlists they’ve joined, and more). You'll now see personalized recommendations over email and on the homepage.

📈 Improved search on Maven

Previously, 20% of searches on Maven would hit a dead end (“zero results”). This month, we improved our search and reduced dead ends significantly. Even if we don’t offer a course with a search term in the title, Maven will recommend “related results” to help students discover related courses.

Here are some queries that went from dead ends to helpful results:

Entrepreneurship: 0 hits to 160 results
Hubspot: 0 hits to 118 results
Tableau: 0 hits to 49 results
Webflow: 0 hits to 7 results
Parenting: 0 hits to 4 results

Improving search is an ongoing effort. We'd love for you to try it out at maven.com.

🔎 Improving Google search results

Google search results will start to display key information like your course outcomes and upcoming cohort dates. It takes some time for Google to crawl all our course pages, so yours may not show right away. Here’s what a search result might look like:

🔗 Create affiliate links to track your course traffic

You can now create unique affiliate links to track your landing page traffic in our new Labs tab. Each link has a unique identifier that tracks clicks to your landing page. You can use this to test affiliate partners, whether it’s a creator, community, company, or newsletter.

✍️ Maven blog

We launched a new Maven blog to drive more visitors to your course. Our blog includes fresh and interesting content about popular course topics. We’re currently focused on growth, product, and leadership, and we will expand to other topics over time.

💻Fixes and improvements

You can now change your Maven email. When you’re logged into Maven, go to “Edit profile” in the top right > “Change email.”
Opening your cohort just got easier. In your settings, click the big green button “Open cohort for enrollment” to let students to enroll or apply.
When inserting custom variables into your emails, we show a preview when you hover your mouse over the variable. This helps you see what the variable is before you send the email.
We improved search on our mobile homepage. Search is above-the-fold, and as you scroll, you'll see 6 course cards at a time (compared to only 4 in the prior version). This new design helps prospective students explore courses more easily.

🔮 In case you missed it

We launched lead magnets last month. Lead magnets are resources that you offer for free in exchange for an email address. There’s a good chance you already have content you could use. Many instructors repurpose a lesson from their curriculum, a worksheet, or a video. In fact, Maven instructors have already gathered over 4,000 leads in the past month through lead magnets.

Here’s how it works:

Click “New lead magnet” from the Lead magnet tab
Add a brief description and a link to your resource
Share the lead magnet page with your audience
View your leads in your waitlist

For inspiration, check out Taylor Davidson, Soufyan Hamid, and Wes Kao's lead magnets, and even more examples in this article.

Maven is an all-one-platform to create a live course. It's the easiest way for experts to make an impact teaching what they love.

Our terms are simple and instructor-friendly: you earn 90% of your course’s revenue minus Stripe transaction fees, and you own all of your IP/content.