How to boost products for your search experience
Boosting one or more products is a way to spotlight strategic products in your commerce store, especially when your shoppers are searching for a specific need. By assigning a higher boost value to selected products, you can promote best‑sellers, seasonal promotions, or newly launched products, so they surface more prominently for shoppers while still respecting organic relevance. Boosting allows you to move selected products higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) for specific queries without changing the underlying catalog or search configuration.
In Empathy Platform, product boosting is managed from the Playboard using the Results Ranking management tool, so you can adjust product positions and immediately see the impact on the search results page.
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Willing to know more about all that you can do by using Results Ranking? Check the Results Ranking management tool page to discover it.
Boosting products for your search experience
Imagine you have an overstock of products from the previous winter season in your clothing store that you need to sell. As winter is coming again, but before the rain pours, you want to ensure that a few fur boots appear first on the SERP, as these products are the most clicked, added to cart, and purchased.
To boost these products in your search experience, perform the following steps:
Open your Playboard and go to Play > Results Ranking.
Click the + New button in the top left corner to create a new Results Ranking configuration. The Configuration panel displays.
In the Details section, make sure the toggle button is switched on so that the configuration is active once it is saved.
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If you turn off the configuration, you can turn it on later using the action tools in the results ranking list screen.
Enter a name for your configuration. For example, "Last season's boots overstock".
Select the endpoint your configuration relates to. In this case, select the Search endpoint.
In the Endpoint section, indicate the queries that the boost configuration should apply. For example, you can type "winter boots".
Select the desired options for the filters to customize the scenario for your configuration. Remember that the available filters depend on your implementation. For this example, select "English" for the Language filter.
In the Settings section, go to Product Ranking to configure a hard ranking. Hard ranking strongly impacts product positioning by moving selected products to the top of the SERP. Refer to the Considerations for boosting multiple products section below to understand product positioning.
- Click the + (plus) icon. The Product ranking pop-up window appears.
- Choose whether the configuration should be always active or scheduled for a determined period. For this example, set the configuration to be active from mid-December to mid-January.
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Review the steps in Scheduling a configuration to learn how to schedule product ranking configurations.
- Enter one or more product IDs and press Enter. To add multiple product IDs at a time (formerly Quick Boosting), use a semicolon (
;) or a comma (,) to separate them. For this example, enter “151378;151382;154380" to boost products with IDs 151378, 151382, and 154380. - Click the Boost button to add the configuration to the list. Remember that you can also boost products directly from the Preview section by hovering over a product thumbnail in the results list and clicking Boost. The product is added to the Product Ranking settings list and placed in its corresponding position on the SERP preview.
In the Preview section, review the product ranking as it will appear to your shoppers. Optionally, enter a keyword in the search box to narrow down the results. You can also select a date to preview the results for a specific time and check product positions in real time based on your configuration. Results update automatically as you make changes to the configuration.
Once finished, click Save to apply the configuration. The saved configuration is displayed in the configuration list on the main Results Ranking screen.
Considerations to boost or bury more than one product
- Make sure you enter valid product IDs. Product IDs aren't checked against the product catalog. If you enter an invalid product ID, it will be ignored. All other valid product IDs are added to the product list.
- When several products are boosted or buried at the same time, the order they follow on the SERP is the order they have in the configuration list.
- Products with conflicts are highlighted in red. A conflict may occur due to an existing product boost or bury. For example:
- A product may have been boosted with an always-active schedule, and you try to create a new boost or bury for the same product ID, duplicating the product boost.
- A product may have been buried with a schedule, and you try to create a new buried product with an always-active schedule. You cannot boost or bury products with conflicts. In these cases, you should remove the product from the Product ID field to save the configuration for the remaining products, and revise the existing configuration for the product ID in the product list.
- If you want to change the schedule applied to the products or remove the boost or bury after you create it, you must edit or delete each product individually in the product list.