Merchandise boosting

What is Merchandise boosting?

Merchandise boosting is the same feature as a Boosted Campaign, described here at the parameter level: a boosting factor from -20 to 20 that shifts how much weight business criteria, like profit margin or stock level, get on a recommendation module, relative to customer relevance. Where a Boosted Campaign is set up through the Merchandising Center's point-and-click campaign builder, this article covers setting the same boosting factor through the Control Panel or directly via an API query parameter, useful when you want to set it programmatically, for example to apply a different weight per category. See How to set up a Boosted Campaign for the campaign-builder version of the same feature.

Prerequisites

• Access to the module's settings in the Control Panel, or to the Raptor API.
• To boost by profit margin (or any other business attribute): that attribute included in your product feed and mapped to a custom field in Raptor.

Key concepts

Boosting factor: A value from -20 to 20 you set on a recommendation module to shift how much weight business criteria, like profit margin or stock level, get relative to customer relevance. This is the same value behind the High, Medium, Low, and Suppress boosting levels in the Boosted Campaign builder

Full info: A module parameter that, when set to true, includes the complete product feed data in the module's output. You need this switched on to access custom fields such as profit margin.

Select: A parameter in the module's Output formatting and filtering settings that limits the response to specific fields, for example RecommendedId,Priority,CustomFieldXX, so you only get back the data you actually need.

Which modules support boosting?

Merchandise boosting works on most Raptor recommendation modules. The only exception is GetCookieHistory, which just returns a customer's last-seen products and has no relevance ranking to boost.

How to set a boosting factor

If you'd rather use the point-and-click campaign builder instead, see How to set up a Boosted Campaign. To set the boosting factor directly:

1. Map the field you want to boost by, for example profit margin, as a custom field on your product feed.
2. In the module's settings in the Control Panel, set full info to true so the module returns the full product feed data.
   
   
3. In Select, under Output formatting and filtering, list the fields you need in the response, for example RecommendedId,Priority,CustomFieldXX.
   
   
4. Set the boosting factor to a value between -20 and 20 (see the table below).
5. Save this as the module's default boosting factor. 

Boosting factor values