1. Product data
2. Search configuration
3. Search management

As you will learn in Search Training, optimizing your product data and how that data is matched to customer searches forms the foundation of your search configuration before you go live with our Software. Ensuring that the correct data points are being processed by Fredhopper in an optimal way gets you 95% of the way toward an optimal search experience.

After your go-live, search management will help you to optimize and maintain the health of your search configuration and that is where this article will assist you.

Search Management Tools

There are four tools at your disposal to effect immediate, daily changes:

• Redirects 
• Synonyms
• Result Modifications 
• Search rankings 

Once you are familiar with these tools and their optimal uses you can use the Search Management Decision Graph below to assist you in improving your search experience with the use of your daily and weekly reports.

Which tool should I use?

The table below is meant to assist you to manage your search with the tools available to you in the Business Manager. For more information on any of the tools, see the document below or follow one of these links:

• Redirects
• Synonyms
• Search Rankings
• Modify Search Results

To recap, three elements affect the quality of a customer´s search experience in your web store: product data, the search configuration and search management. For all queries that you cannot answer with the tools in the Business Manager, the recommendation is to please contact support or your Account Manager.

You can download the full decision graph here: Search Management Decision Graph.xlsx

Redirects

Redirects allow you to block and divert search queries, sending users to a fixed location instead of returning the results of the search query itself. In eCommerce redirects are good solutions for directly taking customers to areas of your site that are not related to products in your catalogue or, currently, do not return results because you do not have such products in your catalogue.

When to use redirects

“Address”, “contact us” and “contact” are common redirects. For example, if you are a fashion retailer and a customer types “contact” into the search box it is likely that he or she is searching for your contact details and not contact lenses, for example.

Brand stores - If your store has "brand stores" or dedicated brand pages you may want to redirect customers directly to those stores/pages depending on their search terms or a search term is returning too many results. If a customer searches for "DKNY" you could direct them to the DKNY brand store as they have indicated an interest in the brand above any of it's specific products. However, if a customer searches for "DKNY watch", you should not to redirect the customer to the brand store/page, placing an extra click between your customer and the product they are looking for, as the customer has already indicated an interest in a specific product from that brand. In the latter case, if you still want to merchandise the fact that you have a brand store for DKNY, we recommend a banner or detail page campaign triggered for searches containing the brand.

Category names - Similarly, if your store has specialised stores or a search term for a high-level category is returning too many results, you may want to redirect customers directly to those stores/pages depending on their search terms . If a customer searched for a generic product/category term such as "dresses" or "jeans". If a customer searches for "dresses" you could direct them to the dresses store or category page if that would result in a curated experience or less results. However, if a customer searches for "red dress" or "Guess dresses", you should not to redirect the customer, placing an extra click between your customer and the product they are looking for, as the customer has already indicated an interest in a specific product. In the latter case, if you still want to merchandise the fact that you have a Dresses Store, we recommend a banner or detail page campaign triggered for searches containing the category.

Poor use of redirects

1. Redirects should not be used to manage poor search results.

2. Avoid placing an unnecessary additional click between your customers and the products that they have shown a clear interest in, as discussed above in the example of a customer searching for "DKNY watches".

3. Poor search results can be the result of poor data quality, a narrow product selection or poor product availability. As data quality and inventory improve so too can your search results. Using a redirect to compensate for poor results for a search term can produce unintended results in time. Product listings on lister pages change as your catalogue grows and changes. An out-dated redirect to a lister page means that customers may not be getting to your latest or relevant results.

• Example 1: A large portion of the misleading results that were surfacing, for a large UK online retailer specialising in groceries, were due to a redirect that had been put in place as a fix for other catalogue challenges years before. The redirect for the search term “salt”, to the condiments aisle in the catalogue, did not return salt on the page. Once the redirect was removed, cooking salt and table salt were clearly in the catalogue, but customers had not been able to find them because of the outdated, unattended redirect.

• Example 2: This redirect on the site of UK fashion retailer created a sub-optimal customer experience by sending customers into a loop.
  
  It is likely that this redirect was set up when winter merchandise was available, however, once the relevant items were out of stock, a poor customer experience was triggered. When customers typed “winter accessories”, “winter”, scarf etc. they were redirected to a page/location that did not display/no longer displayed any results – and the zero-results message kicked in. If the customer then followed any of the instructions on the page to which they were redirected (see below), such as, “Use more specific words” and types in “hats”, the customer would be returned to the same page, restarting the process.
  

Synonyms

A synonym is a word or phrase that has the same (or nearly the same) meaning as another word or phrase in the same language. For example, cold is a synonym for chilly. In online retail, synonyms more commonly refer to products that are the same or nearly the same as other products in the catalogue.

When to use synonyms

The majority of good synonyms exist to take inconsistent product naming and referencing into account. If some product titles contain TV and others contain television and the customer searches for telly, a synonym can render all these terms interchangeable in search and help merchandisers to return both sets of products to customers without having to change all the product titles.  

There are three types of synonyms that you can use to optimise your search in Fredhopper:

= Equals
~ Similar
> Contains

A challenging part of search is to understand synonyms and their consequences.

Poor use of synonyms

1. Synonyms should not be used to make up for a poor selection of products. If a store only offers city bikes, the user could see alternative but similar products like mountain bikes alongside city bikes when searching for "city bikes". However, the user searching for “mountain bikes” should not be shown city bikes without some indication to that customer that his or her search has been modified or added to, therefore, a synonym is not the optimal solution.

2. Spelling corrections do not require synonyms, barring edge cases.

3. Upper case and lower case synonyms are not required. Fredhopper will treat the queries "T-shirt" and "t-shirt" in exactly the same way.

4. Stemming, such as plural dresses for dress,  is handled automatically in Fredhopper and you do not need to create synonyms to achieve results for stemmed terms.

5. Synonyms should, as far as possible, take the customer´s intention into account (see note above). Generally it is easier to click through than to formulate a search phrase in a search box, so customers who search for products, by and large, indicate a high interest in or intent to purchase the product they have searched for.

Decomposition synonyms

Compound words like Damenhose (damen+hose), Cargohosen (cargo+hosen) and sonnenbrillen (sonnen+brillen) are very common in the German language (the same is true for all Germanic languages, including Dutch, Swedish and Danish). In English, adjectives and nouns are often combined into compound structures in a variety of ways, such as secondhand (closed form), t-shirt (hyphenated form) and post office (open form).

In the case of languages such as German and Dutch, the product index (or catalogue) will contain nouns spelled in a composed way but users often search for the split or decomposed term. For example, 'damenhose' appears in the indexed catalogue but "damen hose" is used in the search query.

In English is often the case that two words are compounded over time, for example second hand will become second-hand and eventually secondhand. This results in customer search queries often not matching the term used in the product data. For example, "second hand" to "second-hand" to "secondhand" and, again, secondhand car could be used in the catalogue but the customer query could be "second hand car".

Such cases are best handled by decomposition synonyms, for example bread sticks = breadsticks or Damenhose = damen hose

However, particularly in the case of Germanic language web stores or complicated product lines such as groceries, maintaining your decomposition-synonyms list could become a full-time job. This article describes how to create a set of decomposition synonyms based on a search report and the Fredhopper Data Manager uses a synonyms component to help you to automate this.

Search Ranking

Ranking in general (as managed in the Targeting section of the Business Manager) refers to the product values by which your products are ranked (or the order they appear in, if you will) when navigating to a specific location in a store or when viewing results for search terms.

Every Fredhopper implementation will have a default search ranking (separate from your default navigation ranking) that ranks all search results on your site according to criteria such as match rate, conversion, stock quantity, margin… Whichever attributes you have that you would like to rank on.

However, you can also create separate rankings for specific search terms.

If you wish to rank items for a popular search term, such as “tablet” or “smartphone”, by stock levels, highest to lowest, to ensure that customers will see available items first, creating specific search rankings for these terms is the best practice.

For more on ranking visit About Product Ranking.

Modify search results

Modifying search results, first and foremost, allows for the exclusion of products from search results and, secondly, for the demotion or promotion of products in listings. This feature also allows you to re-rank an item into specific positions such as moving a product from position 3 to position 1.

When to use Modify search results

Regardless of ranking preferences and ranking cocktails (See About Product Ranking), products the business would rather not show in search results at all will sometimes appear at the top of search results. For example, products unsuitable for a younger audience: Fredhopper allows merchandisers to easily block such products from the search results.

In other cases, articles that the business would like to highlight are not appearing at the top of search results. For example, if a customer searches for “Nike” on the site of leading sports retailer, the best-selling products may be socks even though the business wishes to highlight running shoes. Fredhopper allows merchandisers to easily move the socks lower in the results and move shoes up in the search results with the Modify Search feature. This feature also allows you to re-rank an item in position 3 to position 1 or to block an item from the results for example.

Poor use of Modify search results

1. Using this feature to change the position of your top 1 to 5 products is acceptable, but not the top 1 to 150 products, for example. You should avoid using this feature to improve search rankings (see above or contact your account manager).

• Example: A customer is manually moving items with healthier stock levels to the top of search results using Modify search results. This may produce unintended results in the future. If you would like to rank products with higher stock above others, or rank them by another attribute such as margin, rather use a search ranking (See About Product Ranking).

2. Artificially manipulating items ranked by best sellers in a way that does not improve the customer experience are poor uses of this feature.

• Example: A grocery online retailer has moved Cola Drink A above Cola Drink B in search results for the term “cola” as it has received marketing funds from Cola Drink A. The customer expects items on this site to be ranked or sorted by match rate or best sellers, and not that results are manipulated for the benefit of the highest bidder. A more transparent way to use such funding would be to highlight the product in a promotional campaign, that is triggered for the term “cola”, at the top of search results.