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Getting Started with My Relewise
As soon as your Relewise license has been set up, it is possible for you to start working on the implementation of Relewise's services into your website. For the commercial profile, however, the work usually only starts once the baseline of behavioral tracking and data integration has been done, and the service is close to going live.
This guide aims to steer commercial/non-technical profiles towards getting familiar with My Relewise and the basic systems that you will need to tweak the Relewise experience.
Merchandising rules
One of the first steps to getting set up with Relewise is to consider implementing some of the most commonly used Merchandising rules. Learning how to use and tweak merchandising rules is a great way to get underway with My Relewise, and we heartily recommend reading the guides and watching the video that dive into how merchandising works.
Specific, useful rules to consider are:
- Filter Out of Stock Products from your search and recommendation results, to ensure that you only show things that are actually available to the customer
- Boost new products, to help ensure that products recently added to your product catalog are not deprioritized due to low popularity scores
- Boosting specific brands, to help guide your users towards products that benefit your sales more - such as boosting your own brand over third party brands in search results
- Boosting on profit margin, to help ensure that the products you want to sell the most are getting the most attention.
Beyond the immediately useful rules mentioned above, it is wise to get acquainted with the merchandising tool and its functions, as it is the most direct method by which you can affect the results that Relewise serves up, and nudge your customers in the right direction. To help you get acquainted with this system, we have a few guides:
Search Rules
Within Relewise, "Search rules" refers to all of the various ways in which you can affect the search engine through manually created rules. We recommend getting acquainted with the basics of these systems, to understand how you can affect search results according to your needs.
Synonyms
Synonyms are used to specify that two words should be treated as equal by the search engine; either one way, or multidirectionally. This can, for instance, help you specify that searches for a generic product type should also include an implicit search for specific brand names (e.g., including "iPad" in a search for "tablet"), or help overcome regional differences in terminology (e.g., "jumper" and "sweater").
Learn more about synonyms here
Synonyms are similar to search term modifiers in that they affect the search term to produce better results. To better understand when to use one or the other, please refer to our best practices page.
It may be beneficial to identify common synonyms that are likely to occur within your searches, and add them preemptively to the system as you are starting out. This way, your search is optimized immediately.
Stemming & Decompounding
Stemming and Decompounding are both aspects of Natural Language Processing (NLP), which happens by default behind the scenes. Specifically, Stemming attempts to reduce words to their most simple component (its lexical stem), while decompounding attempts to identify compound words and break them down into their constituent parts. The goal of these processes is to help enable ambiguous search terms to match your indexed fields.
By default, you won't need to work with stemming and decompounding in your day-to-day work. However, if you know that there are certain niche compound words in your data - this typically happens within highly specialized fields - you can help the engine identify them to make for better search results.
Redirects
Via the My Relewise UI, it is possible to set up Redirects, which will return a URL as a string for the specified search term(s). This can allow you, for instance, specify that when a user searches for a particular product category name (e.g. Dresses), the site sends them directly to the "Dresses" category page.
Learn more about Redirects here.
A popular use for Redirects is for websites that cover physical stores as well; a search for "stores" or "opening hours" can then redirect directly to the page for the details of the physical stores, rather than performing a product search.
Important to note is that Redirects do not do anything before they have been configured on your own website; simply put, the configuration possible in My Relewise simply specifies one or more search terms, and a URL that should be returned in the query. It is necessary for the frontend website to be set up to receive and parse this URL into something useful.
To ensure that you can use Redirects, you should consult with your development team. It is not, unfortunately, something that Relewise can set up for you.
Search Analytics
Key to getting started with Relewise is understanding what happens in the search, and how to improve it. For this reason, we have created the search analytics tool. We strongly recommend that you, as a commercial user, get acquainted with this tool.
Of particular note within the search analytics are the features Popular Searches and Searches without results. These two tabs reflect current, actionable trends within your users' search behavior that you can address. For instance, if certain terms are being widely searched, would it make sense to create synonyms for those to help broaden or improve the results for the user? If a search is popular but returns zero results, is it worth looking into the search index to ensure that the proper data is searchable? Or are there trends within the zero-result searches that you can translate into better marketing or improving your product catalog?
Note about Search Analytics
It is important to keep in mind that the Search Analytics data is based exclusively on non-anonymous data. This means that your behavioral tracking must be set up to identify users with at least a temporary ID, otherwise the search analytics data will be empty.
Use the date selector at the top of the screen to specify the time range that you want to dig into. If you have integrated multiple languages into your search, you can likewise filter for different languages, currencies, channels and more using the menus at the top of the screen. The Export function allows you to draw this data into a .csv file for local analysis, should you wish it.