When you assign percentage weights, you determine the relative importance of each factor in determining the order of search results. Consider the following guidelines before providing percentages to each factor:
Factor | Guidelines |
|---|---|
Property Prioritization | This factor is useful when searches return a large number of results, and you want to promote products with particular characteristics, such as a brand or inventory status. Typically, property prioritization should not be assigned 100% weighting or have a higher weighting than search term relevance or search term property match to ensure that the first results users see are related to the search text they entered. |
Search Term Relevance | When you don’t know how users search or what they are looking for, provide a high percentage to this factor to ensure that users see the products that include the search text the most often. You are strongly cautioned against giving this factor 0% because doing so inflates the importance of other factors, which may cause the results to be ordered in a way that won’t be intuitive to users. |
Search Term Property Match | Knowing how the search text users enter matches the content structure of your catalog is a key requirement for using this factor. Are users likely to enter, for example, a product name, style, or size as search text? Or are they likely to enter descriptive phrases? You must be able to identify important properties for your catalog, which contain the information that users are attempting to specify in search text, as well as less important properties, which may match search text accidentally. For example, Display name might be an important property that you choose to promote, and Description might be a less important property that you choose to demote. Because this factor bases result placement on search term usage in specific properties, it is most helpful for distinguishing between products in large, diverse catalogs where search text could otherwise be ambiguous. |
To assign a percentage weight, click the Result Prioritization tab:
Enter the percentage weight for property prioritization, search term relevance, and search term property match. Note that percentages need not be equal, and it’s acceptable to keep a factor at 0%. After you click outside of percentage textbox, the total is immediately recalculated both on the top right and at the very bottom of the tab. You can save your changes and exit the tab only after the percentages add up to 100%.
