Every once in a while, you may want to promote (or penalize) several products over others for various reasons. It could be to clear stock, to promote a brand or to introduce a new product.
Doofinder’s Boosting feature is a great way to do this. It does so by providing a way to give more importance to certain product search results over others.
Here, you will see the different ways in which you can apply Boosting to your selected products.
There are four ways to boost the preferred search results for your e-commerce site. These are categorised as follows:
- Manual Boosting
- Boosting rules
- Configuration (Automatic Boosting)
- Boosting through the data feed
📌 Note: The boost field holds floating-point values. Always use the dot (.) to separate the decimal part in the field.
Manual Boosting
Under the Manual Boosting section, you can manually boost your products by setting the boost factor for every product in your data feed directly through the multiplying factor.
Boosting Rules
Under the Boosting Rules section, products are boosted at an attribute level. For instance, promoting one brand or category over another or others.
Say you have groceries among your categories that you want to promote by boosting based on availability. Here’s how you’ll go about it:
- Boosting Rule Name: While it is compulsory to include it, the name you choose is at your discretion. In our example, we’ll name it ‘Availability’.
- Enable this boosting rule: Make sure to check this box.
- Properties:
- Boost: Input the multiple by which you want to boost the product. The number has to be a floating number and cannot be less than or equal to zero.
- Conditions: You can match results under ‘Any’ or ‘All’ circumstances conditionally. Then based on your category (availability), in our case, the type of field value will vary based on ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’. You can add as many conditions as needed.
📌 Note: Using the Results match, ‘Any’ (match_or) and ‘All’ (match_and) depends on the specificity of your conditions. In the preceding image, we have results matching all under two conditions: first, that the availability is in stock, and second, the category is groceries. Should either the category’s availability fall under the ‘is not’ condition, the boosting will not take effect. On the other hand, if the ‘results match’ option get switched to ‘Any’ from ‘All’, the boosting based on availability or categories will match independently.
You can deactivate or delete the boosting rules whenever applicable as well.
Configuration (Automatic Boosting)
Configuration/automatic boosting depends on the algorithm’s learning behaviour based on the customer’s user behaviour. Whereby the more the clicks on a particular product, the more the boosting.
The auto-boosting value is calculated and revalued every 15 days based on the number of product searches within those days. It also has the multiplying factor, which allows you to boost a particular product and give it more importance on a global level within the search.
- Save then refresh, and you’ll see the boosted product goes to the top of the list.
Boosting through the Data Feed
📌 Note: If you manually modify the boost factor in the Doofinder admin, it will be overwritten by the values you set in the data feed, so you have to choose between setting them manually or setting them through the data feed.
Boosting through the data feed varies on the file format used.
Text Format
To boost in this format, you will need to add a new key named boost, adding the values for each row in the file. The values for the boost field must be decimal numbers like 1.2 or 3.73.
XML Format
To boost in XML format, you have first to add the Doofinder namespace to the XML file.
So the RSS format first lines will be like this:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
<rss version='2.0' xmlns:g='http://base.google.com/ns/1.0' xmlns:d='https://www.doofinder.com/ns/1.0'>And the Atom format will start like this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0" xmlns:d='https://www.doofinder.com/ns/1.0'>After that, you can now add the corresponding tags for the boost value for every product, which will be something like this:
<d:boost>2.32</d:boost>Below you can download some examples to see how it works.
📌 Note: The boosting factor must always be greater than 0 and less than 20. Otherwise, the feed will deliver an error. Also, If you manually modify the boost factor in the Doofinder admin, it will be overwritten by the values you set in the data feed.
Should you encounter any problems, please contact support@doofinder.com
Last Updated: June, 2021