Personalized Search & Navigation
Every site visitor is different and looks for things on your website. Moreover, user behavior changes from one day to the next.
Personalized Search & Navigation customize a site visitor's search results and landing pages by considering the visitor's activity and your business rules. When you use Personalized Search & Navigation with Optimizely Commerce Connect, relevancy is unique to each visitor, so it should increase conversions on your website. For example, a teenage soccer fan looking for team apparel gets different results from a mother looking for baby items, even though both search for "shoes."
Benefits of Personalized Search & Navigation
- Increased sales – Optimizing the search experience is shown to increase revenue.
- Better engagement – Improved experience encourages customers to keep shopping.
- Better conversion rates – It is easier for customers to find the products they seek.
- Better retention – Positive experiences encourage customers to return to your site.
Note To add Personalized Search & Navigation, a developer must install and configure your website's personalization service. The developer must also customize search queries so that the abovementioned factors can boost results.
Personalize Search & Navigation: Part of a personalization strategy
Many Optimizely products let you personalize the site visitor experience. For example, you can personalize related merchandise and offer discounts based on a site visitor's history. This topic covers Personalized Search & Navigation only.
How Personalized Search & Navigation works
Personalized Search & Navigation tracks the following visitor information for the current session.
- traffic source
- search query
- categories visited
- selected facets: color, size, brand
- use of ratings and reviews
Personalized Search & Navigation analyzes that information and knowledge from previous interactions (preferences, purchases) to boost search results and landing pages so that the most relevant items for that individual display at the top.
Personalized Search & Navigation cannot affect external search results.
Other factors affecting search results
Ranking and weighting of search results can also consider a merchandiser's business rules or strategies. So, best-selling items, high conversion rates, most revenue, or most units sold can also be used to affect search results. The result is an optimal ordering of search results for every user.
Example of search results before and after personalization is applied
Default content displayed to "unknown" visitor
The content is displayed after a visitor clicks "bed headboards."
Example of boosting results with Personalized Search & Navigation
Notice how the boosting attributes moved the Faded Glory shoes to the top of the search results.
Turn on Personalized Search & Navigation service
If you see the personalization search code (see below) included on your site but still cannot see the difference between normal search and personalized search, you must configure the personalization configuration up properly before the query (query.UsingPersonalization) can work.
query = query.UsingPersonalization(searchCriteria.PersonalizationScope)
First, you must purchase the Personalized Search & Navigation (formerly Personalized FIND) service separate from Optimizely Product Recommendations. Contact your customer service manager (CSM) or account manager to obtain the service.
After purchasing, the service desk team provides the provision, and then the Personalized Search & Navigation is enabled in the Product Personalization portal, as shown below. From here, you can implement the code and test it.
