Merchandise Search Results Page
Using the Merchandising Studio, Visual Editor, or Manual Editor
You can use the Visual Editor or the Manual Editor or Merchandising Studio in the Algolia dashboard to set up Rules to merchandise products on Search pages. The following sections indicates which editor is most suitable for which merchandising task.
To merchandise products on your search results page using the Merchandising Studio, follow these steps:
- From the Merchandising Studio homepage, click Visual merchandiser.
- Set your search query in the search field. In this example, we'll use "purse".
- In the "Ranking factors:" section, click "Curate this query".
- In the section "What do you want to do?", select one or more actions as a consequence of applying this rule: pin items, hide items, boost categories, bury categories, filter results, order facets, turn on Dynamic Re-Ranking, and/or set up a redirect. For this example, let's pin the Moschino Love Handbag in search results position #2.
- Click "Pin items".
- Review your changes in the simulator. You have the option of either saving your new pin rule as a draft to publish later, or you can click "Review and Publish" to publish now as a running change.
SuperUser Tip: If you already have a product in mind you’d like to pin, simply search for the item name in the Pinned items search field, select it from the live result list, and update the Position field to the placement you’d like to pin the item to (in our example, position #2).
To merchandise products on your search results page using the Visual Editor, follow these steps:
- Go to the Rules section of the Algolia dashboard.
- Select the index to which you want to add Rules.
- Click New Rule and select Visual Editor.
Visual Editor: Create a new Rule for merchandising search results
- In the Visual Editor, click Set query condition(s).
- In the section Your search, enter the search query that triggers this Rule.
- Click Apply.
- In the section What do you want to do?, select one or more actions as consequence of applying this Rule: pin items, hide items, boost categories, bury categories, or filter results.
- Review your changes in the simulator and save the Rule.
The following example illustrates a merchandising Rule for the query “hat”. The merchandiser selected a few products and pinned them at the top of the search results in a predefined order.
To merchandise products on your search results page using the Manual Editor, follow these steps:
- Go to the Rules section of the Algolia dashboard.
- Select the index to which you want to add Rules.
- Click New Rule and select Manual Editor.
Manual Editor: Add or edit a Rule for merchandising search results
To add or edit a Rule for merchandising search results, follow these steps:
- Define the conditions that will trigger the Rule.
- Select the consequences for the Rule.
- Optional: add a description and define a time frame when this Rule should apply, for example, during promotional campaigns.
In the following example, when users search for “harry”, a book from the “Harry Potter” series is pinned at the first position of the search results.
Manual Editor: Create a banner with a Rule and custom JSON data
To create a banner in the search results, you can add a Rule in the Manual Editor that returns custom data in JSON format.
In the Manual Editor:
- In the Consequences section, select Return Custom Data.
- Add the custom data you want to return when the Rule is triggered, in JSON format. For example, add a custom banner URL).
Manual Editor: Add query parameters with Rules
In the Manual Editor:
- In the Consequences section, select Add Query Parameter.
- Add a query parameter, for example, to boost a category.
Note: When adding query parameters, check if your values contain spaces or apostrophes. If a query parameter has an apostrophe (single quote character '), or if it contains spaces, enclose the whole value in single quotes. Put two backslashes in front of apostrophes, for example, 'women\\'s', 'value 1'.
The following table describes a few common pitfalls that you might run into when setting up Rules, and their solutions.
