Boosting answer scores

Have you ever wanted to give a boost to a certain product result? Here’s how you can boost and reorder results using your answer rules.

Boosting by Match Rule

Boosting works on each answer Match rule, it is a way of giving more importance to certain terms in the final calculated results query. An ideal scenario is if you have 3 results all with 100% match scores but want to reorder products 1/2/3 to 3/2/1 instead.

First find the workflow Journey you want to edit then the answers that you want to apply a boost to, for example,

Question > Product fields > Answers

Open

Now edit the Answer and find the Boost terms (comma-separated) field:

Open

In here you can now either:

1. Input the match rules in order that you want them prioritised (comma separated)

2. Add a boost score to terms using a ^ score function, where the number can be anything from 0 to 1000 and beyond…
   
   e.g. Casual^3

Would give Casual matches a boost of 0.003 to the score, this number can be any range but remember it is still relative to other questions match rules. So within this answer Casual matched products would get a higher score than !Dress or Sneaker matches:

Changing your sort orders

Boosting works at the match rule level so your final product sort by options may reorder and override what you need, e.g. Highest price first. To get a clearer impact of boosting to your result set, try using Random order (Workflow > Edit > UI Result & Behaviours) which will default back to match + boost scoring:

Boosting certain SKUs

Using the boosts can give a bump to certain term matches but this feature can also be used to reorder SKUs within your results set. This is easiest to see when you have a smaller results set and want to reorder them accordingly.

If you’re using SKU as the match then use the same options to reorder or boost certain SKUs

To reorder

Edit your match rule and order the SKUs, for example:

SKU234,SKU642,SKU654

All scores equal the results will be order (#1) SKU234 (#2) SKU642 (#3) SKU654

To boost

Edit your match rule and apply the boost scores to the SKUs, for example:

SKU654,SKU642^2,SKU234^1

• SKU654 = no boost

• SKU642^2 = highest boost, likely will be shown first (if other scores are equal)

• SKU234^1 = small boost, likely be shown 2nd (if other scores are equal)