Recommendation Boosting

Boosting rules allow you to promote a product or products above those chosen by the strategies. You can define what products to promote using individual product IDs, or product attributes such as category, brand, content, and price. You can boost products across the entire site, or conditionally in certain areas of the site.

Boosting allows retailers to display certain products with more frequency, thereby increasing the number of customers who see those products. This can help to bring new products to customers or eliminate excess inventory.

Boosting does not recommend products that the strategy thinks are not relevant to the current context. If you want to display a product regardless of what the Algonomy strategy defines as relevant, you should use Manual Recommendations.

How It Works

Boosting only promotes products for display that the strategies decided were relevant but were not among the top candidates. For example, the product-based algorithms (ProductViewedViewed) have on average 30 candidates that they can recommend to the shopper. Depending upon how your placement is configured, the top 5 products (based on a relevance score) might be shown to the shopper. If a boosting rule is set up for a product that is in position 20, then that product would be promoted to the front and displayed to the shopper. Boost rules identify the qualified products (that is, 'Private Brand') and move them to the front of the returned products list while preserving their relative product ranking. Then, all the non-boosted items get to play in the order chosen by the strategy.

Note: Boosting will only apply to Advanced Merchandising results if the "Enable system filters and rules" option is enabled in the Advanced Merchandising rule. Boosting is applied to backfill products used when Advanced Merchandising does not produce the minimum number of products required by a placement and "use backfill" is selected for that Advanced Merchandising rule.

Sample Use Cases

You can:

  • Reduce inventory levels of a product by showing it more often in recommendations

  • Increase revenue by promoting a higher-margin brand or product

  • Seed a category in advance of a promotional campaign (for example, increasing the volume of Halloween product recommendations prior to a holiday promotion to ensure that these items are recommended sitewide once the promotion is underway)

  • Manually promote one or more products or content on a specific placement on a specific page

Boosting

To use boosting rules, On the Omnichannel Personalization dashboard, go to Recommendations > Recommendation Boosting. The Recommendation Boosting page is displayed with the rules already created.

The Recommendation Boosting page displays all the existing rules with the details such as name given to the rule, where the rule is applied, what the rule is applied to, the start date and end date (if any) for the rule, and whether or not it is active in the Production and/or QA/Integration environments.

You can perform the following on the rules:

  • View expired rules: To see expired rules, select the Show Expired checkbox at the top right of the page.
  • Search for rules: To search for a rule, use the search box at the top right.
  • Add rules: To add a new rule, click +Add Rule.
  • Delete rules: To delete a rule, select the checkbox next to the rule, then click Delete Selected.

How Boosting Rules Operate

Boosting rules allow you to ensure specific products, whether that is defined by a more general context or specific to given products, are the first products to be displayed in recommendations. The boosting rules are cumulative in nature and all these rules get evaluated at the same time. If a product is being boosted as much as another product, those two products are moved to the top of the recommendation list, with the product that has the higher natural ranking as 1. If it is intended for the product that is 2nd in natural rankings to be the top product displayed, it needs more boosting behind it than the other product.

What does this mean in specific scenarios?

Each of the two products have a boost rule assigned to the same placement (Placement 1).

Placement 1 has a strategy playing:

  • Products returned by strategy naturally:
    • Product 123
    • Product 234
    • Product 345
    • Product 456
    • Product 567
  • 2 boost rules are in effect on placement 1: boost rule A calls for product 345 to be boosted, and boost rule B calls for product 456 to be boosted. Given the natural order, the rules are calling for the product 3 to be boosted and the product 4 to be boosted. So, what is the new order? Since 345 is naturally higher than 456, and they have the same number of boosting rules lifting them up, 345 becomes product 1, 456 becomes product 2. The original rankings in relation to each other of equally boosted products takes precedent.

Each of the two products have boost rules, but one has 2 boost rules set while the other only has one:

Placement 2 has a strategy playing:

  • Products returned by strategy naturally:
    • Product 123
    • Product 234
    • Product 345
    • Product 456
    • Product 567

  • 3 boost rules are in effect on placement 2: boost rule A calls for product 345 to be boosted, boost rule B calls for product 456 to be boosted, and boost rule C also calls for product 456 to be boosted. In this scenario, 345 is naturally ranked higher than 456, and both products are being boosted but 456 is being boosted twice. So, what is the new order? Since 456 is boosted twice, it becomes the top delivered product, while 345 becomes #2. The double boost of 456 vs single boost of 345 is factored in and cancels out the fact that 345 is naturally ranked higher.

Create New Rules

For step-by-step instructions to create new rules, see Create Boosting Rules.

Manage Rules

For step-by-step instructions to manage existing rules, see Manage Boosting Rules.