Manage the search ranking criteria for your product catalogue with no-code controls

Equalize allows you to configure the weighting of the product attributes used for ranking product results in the search engine. It determines the relevance and importance of the searchable product catalogue fields where specific relevant values matching the search query are found.

Should color be more relevant than specific product features? Should any terms found in the product description take preference over the name? Should products with no stock be last in the results list? Equalize helps you determine which product attributes the search engine takes as more relevant when ranking the results on the search engine results page (SERP).

The Equalize management tool is used to rearrange the product ranking based on the relevance of the product attributes to fulfill the merchandising goals. You can also get greater granularity with Equalize as you can set up multiple configurations based on different segments (language, store, device, etc.) and weight the product catalogue attributes through four scoring criteria.

The four scoring criteria you can configure are the following:

• Textual match: determine the weight of certain product catalogue attributes when there is a textual match between the query searched and the text present in these particular attributes.

  
  

  For example, if shoppers are looking for a “red dress” in their search and your product catalogue only has two red dresses, you can give more relevance to the Color attribute rather than to the Name attribute. Thus, products whose Color attribute matches the search query, such as red skirts, will be ranked in a higher position as they have red as the color, even if they don’t have dress in their name attribute.

• Semantic match: decide the weight for the vector enrichment source used to enhance the searchable product catalogue attributes when there is a textual match between the query searched and the text present in the enriched attributes.

  
  

  For example, whether your product catalogue has been enriched with values from your domain, you can give more relevance to this domain-specific enriched attribute. Like this, when shoppers look for a “vacation shirt” in their search, hawaiian styled shirts will be ranked, as vacation and hawaiian are semantically related terms.

• Global business rules: boost with positive values or demote with negative ones the relevance of a product catalogue attribute upon others present in the product results to enhance product ranking.

  
  

  For example, when setting up your product catalogue, you may have added several product attributes such as On sale, or Latest added to your products. During Black Friday sales, you can increase the weighting for the On sale attribute to make it more important and decrease the weighting for Latest added attribute. Doing this, the search engine will place in first positions the products which are on sale and in last positions those which are new in the catalogue.

• Function score: increase or decrease the product scoring based on customized KPIs, whose values are numbers, previously set up. Consider that zero is also a valid weight.

  
  

  If you have certain products with no stock and you don’t want them to be listed on the SERP. You can set up the Stock attribute via the function score criterion to decrease the relevance of the products out of stock. They’ll be hidden at the bottom of the results list.

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You can use one, two, three, or the four scoring criteria combining them depending on your needs considering that the textual match criterion is the only one that can be used alone. As the scoring criteria are set up through the Instance Management tool during implementation, contact your Key Account Manager to make the necessary changes.

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Adjusting Equalize values changes the search engine behavior for all product results.

When a retailer has different stores in several countries, such as Spain, Mexico, and Colombia, their products have distinct needs in terms of visibility depending on the country. Imagine that the Mexican and Colombian stores are newly created marketplace stores, so marketplace products need to be more visible. However, this higher visibility is not needed for the main store in Spain, so the rest of the products should keep their normal behavior.

• What can you do?
  You can induce the product ranking of the marketplace products you need to promote in Mexico and Colombia by modifying the overall relevance of some of their attributes.

• How can you do it?
  You can define the overall relevance of some of your product catalogue attributes to give them more or less importance depending on your marketing and business strategies and placing the products you want to promote in a higher position. Use the Global business rules functionality of Equalize to give more weight to the Marketplace attribute, if you have it defined in your product catalogue.

  Once the marketplace products from Mexico and Colombia have this attribute, these products are ranked higher on the results page of these two commerce stores. With Multiequalize, you can configure different scenarios for your different stores, so you create a configuration only for your main Spanish store without interfering with the others for Mexico and Colombia.

For this use case, configuring the overall relevance of attributes with Equalize is not the only way to make specific products stand out in your shoppers' search and discovery journeys. Note that you can also take advantage of other Empathy Platform search features, like Product Ranking, Promotions, Redirections, and even curated Related Tags and curated Next Queries.

Spot the difference

Equalize and Attribute Ranking both use the product attributes of your product catalogue to determine the ranking of results. However, their purpose and function is different. Equalize determines the overall importance of the product catalogue attribute in the search, used as the weighting for calculating the product scoring. Whereas, Attribute Ranking changes the order in which products appear according to a specific product attribute value, boosting or burying products with that specific product attribute higher or lower in the results. In other words, you use Attribute Ranking to boost a specific attribute without changing the overall search engine ranking behavior.

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For more information on how products are scored and ordered in the results, see Product Scoring.

Use Equalize to…

• Adjust the search ranking criteria according to merchandising goals, for example, show in-stock products higher in the search results.
• Improve findability by making sure the right type of products is listed first.
• Determine the weighting of product attribute fields in product score calculation.

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Check out how to tailor product attributes weighting with Equalize.