Facets Video Tutorial

 

 

Video tutorial transcript

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to this short video introducing facets.

This video demonstration will familiarise you with facets and how they are set up in Fredhopper’s Merchandising Studio.

Please be aware that test data is used throughout this demo, and you should refer to your own data sets when applying this functionality.

What are facets?

Facets provide a way to help shoppers sort and find products intuitively. Faceted navigation is sometimes found in the side of a site or at the top of a product lister page. Each ecommerce site is different, and facets will vary between sites depending on the level of attribution and should be added if you believe it will enhance the shopping experience. 

Setting up Facets provides a structure to your site to help shoppers understand what is available and how to search for it. Facets can also help shoppers refine and find products in large categories/search results.

Facet configuration considerations

There are a few things you need to consider when setting up your facets. These are:

Their placement in the catalogue

A) Under what circumstances you want the facet to appear in your site, and

B) The order the facets will appear in a page

Their visualisation – how they will appear, checkboxes allowing multi-choice, or a colour swatch (these are set upon request and are not part of the standard default options).

The sorting of their values – what order the values within the facet should appear, i.e. alphabetically, manually ordered, or by the size of the products available for each value.

Grouping of the values: group specific facet values, i.e. where a colour is split over more than one value (Blue = aquamarine, navy, baby blue, sky blue, cornflower blue etc.., or grouping sizes UK and EU sizes into S, M or L).

It is valuable that you have a good understanding of your product catalogue and how to make facets useful in your shoppers' journey.

So how do we set up a facet in the Merchandising studio? Let’s use a scenario to implement one.

The scenario is to create a facet for the attribute Activity to show as the third facet as a multi-select on all category and product lister pages. The value for ‘Outdoor’ should appear at the top of the facet values.

How to demo

Using your credentials, open your Merchandising Studio. This will open on the campaigns tab by default.

1. From the navigation bar, click on the Facets tab and click New.
2. Give the facet a name:
3. Click Select Scope and choose the scope:
4. Click on the 'Select trigger' dropdown. See 'Getting Started with facets’ for more information on Triggers.
5. In this scenario, we want the Activity facet to be everywhere except the homepage, so we need to set up a catalogue location trigger:

And then choose the location:

 You’ll see that I am now in Preview, where I can navigate to the required location.

The location we want is the homepage – so simply click Select Location:

Tick all except these locations.

Change the dropdown 'starts with' to 'equals':

This configuration means that the facet will fire when the catalogue location is not equal to home, but anywhere else on the site.

Next, set up the facet content. Firstly choose the attribute Activity from the dropdown:

Here you can order the facet values. By default, all available values will be displayed in the facet:

But you can re-order or group values accordingly, by clicking Add of List Values.

So let’s create a facet value for Outdoor, note that All available values have moved to the top (see the next image).

Firstly, click on Make facet value – this is the name you want to give it.

 If you were creating a size facet to group different sizes, small medium and large you would call this small, and then add the relevant values maybe small waist measurements then medium and large.

Now add the associated value, click on Add Value.

The values for this attribute will be displayed, select Outdoor.

Then click Apply.

Now we need to configure the display conditions.

So, we want to sort the facet values by size, so we can leave this as is.

Next, we’ll change the Minimum to 2. This means that the facet will show if there are 2 or more values for this attribute.

Lastly, change the Lateral setting to Multiselect. This allows the shopper to choose more than one of the facet values displayed, for example, they can choose Snow and Outdoor, or Gym and yoga.

Check your facet configuration is accurate and click Save:

It’s best practice to check the facet is firing as expected, so go to your Preview site.

Now, navigate to any category page to see facet appears as expected:

You will see that this newly created facet appears at the top. You may prefer the categories facet to appear first so you can change the order of the facets on the facets homepage.

And you will see that Outdoor appears last on the list, so let's correct this – go back to your FHR Merchandising Studio and make the changes.

Let’s change the order of the facet values first. We want outdoor to appear at the top, so we need to move our Outdoor facet value above ‘All available values’. So move it up using the arrow. 

Click Save and close.

Now you are at the facet homepage.

You can see all the facets that are active, either being edited or are published.

The order facets appear here when you have selected a scope, is the order they will appear on your site, so let’s move our activity facet to position or priority 3.

Check again in Preview to check that the facet appears where you want it to; just refresh the page.

Great – we can see that the facet is now the 3^rd facet to appear and Outdoor is the first facet value.

Let’s check the facet doesn’t appear on the homepage...

Let’s just check it appears correctly for another category and then we can publish the facet configuration.

Go back to the Merchandising Studio and Send the facet for Publication:

Once the facet is published it will trigger according to your cache process.

Best practices

• The priority of the facets found on the Merchandising Studio facet homepage replicates the order they will appear on your site. To re-order facets, change the priority on the facet's homepage.
• If you have created more than one facet using the same attribute on the same scope, using the same trigger only one will appear. The facet will appear according to the priority order.
• If you create a new facet, this will automatically take priority One. These can be reordered in the facet's homepage.
• There are three key things to keep in mind when setting up your facets:
  • Their visualisation
  • Placement in your site and
  • The grouping, sorting and ordering of the values

Thank you for watching this demo video, we hope you have enjoyed this quick introduction to facets.