A variety of strategies are and will be available for Raptors search solution, Raptor Site Search. These strategies allow you to rank and personalize search results to create the best possible and most profitable search experience for your customers. The module also allows you to use Merchandising within your site search. All products sorted by popularity and trends for Raptor Search will supply you with a product-list corresponding to the search phrase entered by the customer sorted by popularity and conversion-rates. This way, you can nudge the best converting and most popular products, increasing the chance of converting the search to a sale.
Activating the strategy for Raptor Search
You can find the strategy in the Search Personalization section of the Raptor Control Panel. Navigate to the Inactive tab, and you will find it near the bottom, in the Raptor Search segment.
Simply click on Activate to start the process. You will be given the option to engage it for sister-accounts as well - click on the checkboxes next to the relevant lines if you wish to apply it more widely. Whether you do or not, however, you need only click on the Activate button to finalize the process.
It will, as shown above, take roughly 24 hours for the algorithm to warm up. However, you can already start setting up the strategic parameters by clicking on the Go to module button - or, you can simply select the process from the Active tab of Search Personalization at a later time.
Configuring the search strategy
To configure the search strategy, click the module under the Active tab. You will see two sets of Settings - Rerank Opportunities and Output Enriching. Of these, Rerank opportunities is by far the broadest, and where we will focus first.
This selection contains multiple options, each measured across one week, thirty days or a year. First is Visit Weight, second is Buy Weight online and offline, third is Visit Trending Weight and last is online and offline Buy Trending Weight (trending weight is not available in a one-year timeline) - each of the resulting fifteen options can be set on a scale from 0 to 20. Note that these numbers are largely arbitrary - what matters is the relative relationship between them.
For example, in the default setting, the 7-day Trending Weight is set to 4, and the 30-day Trending Weight is set to 2 - meaning, products gaining momentum over the past week are considered to be twice as important as those generated over the past month. At the same time, the 7-day Buy Weight and 7-day Visit Weight are both set to 8, which means that they're both considered to be twice as important as the trending. All of these sliders can be moved independently, adjusting the output to suit your purposes.
As for the Output Enriching, filtering and selection option, this is a far simpler affair.
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You can use the Product filter entry-box to manually filter out specific products from the algorithm's consideration. Simply enter the relevant ProductIDs in a comma-separated list with no spacing.
Switch the Full info-toggler on, if you want filter on other parameters then ProductIDs, e.g. brand or category.
The settings under Merchandising Integration are automatically set when creating a Merchandising campaign. By applying this module to your boosted Merchandising campaign during campaign creation, you can control which products should be boosted in top of the search.
Testing
Once you are done weighing and filtering, you can use the Test option to check your approach, and see what effect your choices have on the results. Simply click the Test button at the bottom, and you will receive a data readout with a list of ProductIDs, ranked according to the current settings of the algorithm.
The product that ranks highest according to the settings will be scored as 1. Other products will be given a score corresponding to how close they are to this product in terms of popularity. In the example above, you can see that two of the products are very close in terms of popularity, while all others are rather distant. By altering the various settings, you can potentially alter these rankings.
When you are satisfied with the outcomes, simply hit the Save settings button. Once the algorithm is done chewing over all your data, your personalized Search Index will thus be ready for deployment!
Scheduling
In the upper-right corner of the Customization-view, you can find the Edit Run Schedule button. Clicking this will open a pop-up that lets you select when and how often the algorithm is updated with the latest purchase-info from your system.
By default, it will run ever 24 hours, at six in the morning, where network-loads are generally light. However, you are free to select a different time, select more frequent runs, or exclude certain days of the week. You can use this to ensure that the algorithm is fully up-to-date at the most important times, or to lessen server-load when such updates would be pointless anyway, such as the weekends - however, for most purposes, it is safe to leave this at the default setting.
With your Product Sort now configured, you will - in the vast majority of cases - also want to set up a Search Index, if you haven't already. The two are rather symbiotic in nature. For this, see: How to Configure and Test a Search Index.