For a given query, you may wonder why certain unintended products show up in searches or the products you want to have show up don't show up at all.
Take running shoes for example. You wonder why a known brand of running is not showing up in test searches.
You are confronted with the dilemma of having to be a detective to discover why your search results are not rendering as expected.
The Merchandising console provides a search explainability feature, which lets you gain insights as to potential problems with their search results and does the diagnosis for you.
Essentially, Merchandising console breaks down the building blocks of a query to help you examine what is going on, how your products are positioned and why, so that you're left not guessing why one product is ranked higher than another.
Self-serve search explainability
Merchandising console enables a self service to explain potential issues in your search results. It exposes the relevance and revenue scores of each product. It also shows the the active controls applied to it by clearly highlighting which product is pinned by this campaign, or this product is buried by this global rule. It will surface key analytics, telling you this product was deleted, or this query is new and undertrained.
| Potential issues | Self-serve explanation |
|---|---|
| Product is relevant? | Show me relevance and revenue expected scores |
| Product is a best seller? | Show me relevance and revenue expected scores |
| Control is applied? | Show me controls impacting this product |
| Product is in catalog? | Show me analytics |
| Undertrained query? | Show me analytics |
Query explain
Usually, issues arise out of seemingly irrelevant search results being surfaced. The Query explain feature lets you hone in on the issue for each query across products right in the Merchandising console.
Each product appears as tile with the revenue and relevance scores on each card.
For example, if you run a query running shoes in the Preview, Query explain can provide insight as to why a certain running shoe might not be showing up in the search results preview as expected.
By looking at the product details on each product tile, you can determine why a given product is behaving differently than expected for the given query. This could be due to:
- A control that governs the targeted behavior not being applied. For example, if you want the product boosted, ensure that a boost or bury control is applied.
- Low relevance, which indicates a need to adjust the product description in the catalog.
- Low revenue score
- Out of stock (no longer in the catalog) can cause a product to not show up in the search results at all, despite the right controls being applied and serving configs activated.
If the product does not show up in your test query, it is time to do more investigation.
Impact of controls on search results
Imagine climbing shoes show up in running shoes queries and you want to get to the root cause of why.
Click the slider controls page to view which controls you have published. Be sure you have controls configured for the exact running shoes query.
If you find a running shoes control, return to Home.
Run a Preview search for running shoes. Do your climbing shoes show up there?
If so, click the climbing shoe product tile to see its description in order to explore whether it is a relevance issue.
If it has a high revenue score, ensure you don't have any other controls on running shoes that boost or pin high-revenue products. If so, that could be the problem and you should remove that control so that the climbing shoe no longer appears in running shoes searches.
Click Query controls to explore the global behavior of the running shoes query across products by highlighting controls to visualize which ones appear when applying them. Toggle the highlights on or off to see which products appear and disappear in the preview to observe their behavior. By testing the controls before making actual changes to them or to your products, you can gauge which control could be impacting the behavior or which one needs to be applied.
If you have still not found the problem — or conversely, if you want the climbing shoes to appear in running shoes searches and they don't — try repeating these steps for a wider shoes query and see which products appear.
