Boost Rules

Product boost rules change the way retailers manage products on their site. Instead of telling your ecommerce software where to put items individually, merchandisers create rules based on product attributes and the system dynamically orders products. This approach is simpler, more intuitive and reduces mistakes.

Product boost rules allow you to create rules that will dynamically boost products with certain attributes to the top of your organic results set (after your explicitly promoted products). These rules will continue to stay in effect and re-order your products in real time as their information changes.

Tip: See how product boost rules interact with other product sorting influences on your site here.

Setting up Boost Rules

Let’s say that you want this category page to feature products that are red, with the highest-priced products shown first. Instead of manually searching out every red product and dragging it to the top, Product boost rules can do it for you.

Tip: You can add up to a maximum of 20 boost rules.

Select a Campaign

To begin, either create a new campaign in Visual Merchandising to play around with, or go to an existing campaign.

Add a Rule

Open the Boost toolbox on the left.

Here you can add either a boost (a "Grouping" of products) by clicking "Add Boost Rule", or you can configure how products are sorted after groupings by clicking "Add Tie-breaker Rule".

Add Boost Rule

The "Add Boost Rule" pop-up window will display all fields available for a rule. Scroll down or use the Search box at the top of the window to search for a field.

In the example below, we have chosen the field "In Stock" (available) and set the value to 1 (True). Click the red minus (-) button to the right to remove this rule.

Add Performance-based Boost Rule

You may also add a boost rule related to performance. To learn more about this type of rule, click here.

Add Tie-breaker Rule

Tie-breaker rules help the system determine which products to give priority in recommendations if they match in all other aspects, such as filters and boost rules. Tie-breaker rules were formerly known as "sub-sort" rules. Because of the nature of sorting, these tie-breaker rules always come after any groupings.

The "Add Tie-breaker Rule" pop-up window will display all fields available for a rule. Scroll down or use the Search box at the top of the window to search for a field.

In the example below, we have chosen the field "In Stock" (available) and set the value to 1 (True). Click the red minus (-) button to the right to remove this rule.

Configure the Boost Rule

Once you've selected your field, choose what kind of match or behavior you'd like it to boost with. You can configure whether a rule is matching a specific value ("is"), matching everything that's not a specific value ("is not"), or you can change it to a tie-breaker rule ("is sorted").

Number properties also have these boost types available: the "is more than" and "is less than" options will group products based on a number criteria and push them to the top. This can be useful if you want to promote all products that are above a certain price, below a certain number of days old, or have a performance number above a certain point.

• "is" or "is not": You can type in what you’d like to boost by (such as “red”) or select a known value from the dropdown. Add as many different values here as you'd like to group in this boost rule.

Tip: This selector provides up to 10,000 different values from the field you've selected.

• "is sorted": Toggle the sort by clicking "High to Low" or "Low to High”. 
• "is more than" or "is less than": Enter the number to be the cut-off point for this product group. For example, you could boost products whose price is more than "50".

Default Sort Order

The default sort option on your site is always used as the final boost tiebreaker for ordering products, so you'll notice that it shows up at the bottom of the boost lists, underneath the Tie-breaker Rules section. This is the default sort order your shoppers see on the page. When boost rules are applied, this sort order is used as the final tie-breaker. In this example, the default sort order is "best_seller", sorted from high (most popular) to low.

A group of products that are red are being boosted to the top, and then those products are being sub-sorted (using a tie-breaker rule) by "Total Sold", High to Low. The non-red group of products will also be sub-sorted by descending "Total Sold".

See how it affects your products

After setting some boost rules, you can see the boost rules in action as shown in the "Boosts" section visible on each product.

When a product no longer matches a boost rule, the colored dot by the value will be empty -- this color is the same color as the boost in the Boosts toolbox. This is helpful in identifying where each subgroup of boosts begins and ends, and why.

You can always add more boost rules, delete ones you’ve made, or re-order them. Remember that the top boost rule will always be the first priority. Because of the nature of sorting, tie-breaker rules (subsidiary sorts) always come after any groupings. 

Save the Campaign

Click the "Save Campaign" button at the top-right of the page to save your changes.

Move or Delete Rules

You can rearrange boost rules by dragging them up or down by the six-dot handle at the left of each rule. You can also remove a boost rule by clicking the red minus icon to the right of a rule.

Missing Fields

If you've set a boost rule in the past and the field it's using (such as "promo_price") no longer exists in your products, the rule will still appear as a greyed-out version that is inactive. If the data comes back later, the rule will resume being active. You can still remove and rearrange disabled rules. 

Global vs. Normal Boosts

If you have boosts set up on a global campaign, then those boost rules will apply across your entire site until overridden by custom boosts on a more specific campaign.

You can make custom boost rules for this page (overriding the global boosts) by changing any boosts in this toolbox. If you'd like it to fall back to using your global boosts again, simply click "Reset to default".

You cannot override global boost rules with nothing. If you attempt to remove all boosts, you will be required to either "Reset to default" (using the global boosts), or add custom boost rules(s) to this campaign.