Boosts & Personalized Search
In this guide, you can read and learn about the Hello Retail search functionality with boosts and personalized search.
The Hello Retail search functionality will present your visitors to your webshop with instant search results based on relevancy, popularity, and additional data collected from the total behavior using your shop.
Hello Retail constantly monitors what products are clicked on and what is bought. Therefore, the search results are finetuned from the latest data available.
Please be conservative with the amount of boost you apply - a boost of 1 or 2 is likely to give the result you wish while boosting more can lead to degraded relevancy. This applies to both boosts and personalized boosts.
Boosts
Boosts will allow you to tweak the results presented to the visitors on your webshop when searching your site.
It depends entirely for your liking and fitting to your strategy but you could boost a specific brand due to higher markup or any other considerations.
Available fields and values depend on what data is available to Hello Retail from your feed, so a well-defined and detailed feed is essential to give you the most options.
How to Set Up Boosts
- Start by logging into your Hello Retail account. On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the On-site section, click on Search to unfold the drop-down menu.
- Next, from the drop-down menu, click on Search Engines.
- In this view, you can the list of the different search engines and click on the ones that you would like to Edit.
- Click on Edit search settings.
- Scroll down to find Boosted Products.
- Inside Boosted Products, it is possible to select a specific Field where you want to boost a particular group of products.
- Click Save when you are done.
The boosted value will now be prioritized in the search functionality. Please allow up to 5 minutes for the Hello Retail system to adapt to the new settings before testing the result.
For the example above, brand has been chosen. When choosing brand, a list of available brands will be presented under the field of Value.
From this, you can find the brand that you would like to have boosted.
More Examples & Use Cases
Another possible field to boost could be isOnSale where the value can be either true or false. Setting this field to true will ensure that products on sale will be boosted in the search results.
Hierarchies can also be boosted (hierarchies is the Hello Retail term for categories) where the available values depend on the hierarchies available in the feed you have provided.
Any of the available fields and values are defined by the data available from the feed that you have provided. This is why the options will vary from shop to shop.
Personalized Search
Personalized Search takes the search experience to the next level by further tuning the search results. This is done by having the search results will be based on the visitor's recent behavior to ensure hyper-personalized results increasing the conversion rate even more.
How to Use Personalized Search
When activated, Personalized Search will immediately take effect and tune the search results to fit the visitor's unique preferences based on the behavioral data available to Hello Retail.
It is also possible to tailor and control what parameters are the most important for you and how to include them in the personalization strategy for your webshop.
How to Set Up User Personalized Settings
- Start by logging into your Hello Retail account. On the dashboard view, navigate to the left-hand side menu. Under the On-site section, click on Search to unfold the drop-down menu.
- Next, from the drop-down menu, click on Search Engines.
- In this view, you can the list of the different search engines and click on the ones that you would like to Edit.
- Click on Edit search settings.
- Scroll down User personalized settings.
To use personalized boosts, pick a parameter in Fields and apply a boost on the slider to make the change. - Press Save to save the changes and allow for a minute to pass before testing.
More Examples & Use Cases
An example could be if a visitor has been browsing for shoes for men and then searches for a specific brand of shoes in the Hello Retail search bar. Based on this recent type of behavior, Hello Retail will not only present popular products from that brand but will also prioritize shoes for men.
Next, if the visitor performs a search for jeans, the Hello Retail search will present jeans as usual. However, the search will prioritize jeans for men with the brand that the visitor previously viewed from the previous example.
Personalized Search is available for Hello Retail users with Professional Search and Enterprise Search. Contact Hello Retail to get more information.
Personalized Boosts
In the settings for User Personalized Settings, you will find Personalized Boosts. Through Personalized Boosts, you can change how Hello Retail will prioritize the parameters used for personalization—for example, brand, gender, color, category, or any other parameter available from your product data.
How Personalized Boosts Work for User Personalized Search
As an example of the personalized boost for user personalized search if the visitor has recently been browsing for black shoes for men from Nike, Hello Retail has (at least) four parameters from which subsequent search results can be personalized.
Without any active boosts if the same visitor performs a search for jeans, then black jeans for men from Nike will automatically be prioritized in the results.
If you would like to have gender be of a higher priority then this can done through boosts.
If you apply a boost for gender, the search engine will prioritize gender in front of the other parameters. The result will still include black jeans for men from Nike but to a greater extent from different brands and colors—but with a boosted priority on "for men".