How to pin products for your search experience
Pinning products in the search experience lets you fix specific items into exact positions on the search engine results page (SERP) for chosen queries, regardless of their organic ranking.
This is especially useful when you want certain products, such as hero items, campaign highlights, or key brand pieces, to always appear first when shoppers search with particular terms. By configuring pin rules for products and associating them with target queries, you can ensure their placement in the results without changing your catalog data or the overall relevance logic for the rest of the listings.
In Empathy Platform, pinning products on the search experience 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.
Pinning products for your search experience
Imagine your clothing store is launching a new sneakers collaboration with a well-known brand, and you want some hero products to be the first things shoppers see in the results. When customers search for terms like “white sneakers” or “leather sneakers”, you can pin these specific sneakers to the first position in the SERP for those queries so they always appear ahead of other results. Other sneakers will still be shown and ranked by relevance underneath, but pinning guarantees your collaboration pair consistently gets top visibility during these high-intent search journeys.
To pin 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's 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, "Sneakers collab".
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 "white sneakers" and "leather sneakers".
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 the products to be pinned.
- Click the + (plus) icon. The Pin product 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 the beginning of February until the end of April.
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Review the steps in Scheduling a configuration to learn how to schedule product ranking configurations.
- Enter the product ID and indicate the position you want the product pinned. For this example, pin the product IDs "175965", "137328", and "145711" in positions 1, 2, and 3, respectively. Remember that you must do it one by one.
- Click the Pin button to add your configuration to the list.
- Alternatively, you can pin a product directly in the Preview section by hovering over a product's thumbnail in the results list and clicking the Pin button. The Pin product window opens so you can set the configuration. Then, the product is added to the list in the Pinned Products settings section and moved to the configured position.
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 when pinning products on the SERP
You cannot boost, bury, or hide products that have already been pinned in a certain position or place two products in the same position. However, you can modify, schedule, or preview your pinned products as you do when boosting, burying, or hiding them.