What’s new in Nosto: Score insights—discover what impacts your product visibility & optimize for business needs 

One of the main ways that brands use Nosto is to ensure their on-site product visibility isn’t only relevant for different shoppers, but is also aligned with their own business goals. Win-win!

This means that often, however, there’s a multitude of variables that come into play and impact product visibility. A single search results page for a specific query, for instance, could have different merchandising rules, keyword matches from various searchable fields, and synonym matches all playing into it—each with varying levels of influence. 

When juggling this logic and questioning why a certain product appears in a certain place for a certain segment on a certain page, there can be lots to get your head around!

Good news: our latest update means you can wave goodbye to these unanswered questions. Score insights has entered the room—offering merchants a deep dive into exactly what influences their product visibility across search pages, category pages, and within product recommendations.

In this article, we take a look at the different components that score insights brings to the table. We’ll highlight the handy ways in which you could be using it, and share what you need to get started. 

A look under the hood

Firstly, you can find score insights by either heading directly to the product preview or wherever you’re creating or editing merchandising rules.

Notice the ‘Show affecting rules’ button. This reveals all possible merchandising rules that have an impact on the currently shown product listing, as shown below.

Understanding the product listings

It’s important to note the differences when analyzing search page listings, category page listings, and Product Recommendations.

• Search page listings have two main contributing factors: merchandising rules and keyword matches.
• Product Recommendations also have two main contributing factors: merchandising rules plus a relevancy scoring mechanism (which varies between recommendation types and also depends on the page context).
• Category page listings are solely determined by merchandising rules.

The product listing ‘score’  

Whichever of the three you’re reviewing, you’ll notice a percentage figure in the top right corner of each product card. This determines the position of each product within the given listing. 

The top-ranked product will always be 100%, and the following products will have a score that reflects the difference between them and the top-ranked product. This helps you understand how much change would be needed to shift certain products up or down (or left or right, in the case of Product Recommendations).

Reviewing search page listings specifically? Then you’ll also spot a ‘relevance’ bar on each product card. This shows the extent to which the product score is impacted by merchandising rules (blue) vs keyword matches (green). Quick tip: hover over the blue section to reveal precisely which merchandising rules are coming into play.

Reviewing Product Recommendations? Same approach applies, only with recommendation relevancy replacing Search’s keyword matching.

Score detail

For a more granular analysis of a score calculation, click the ‘View score detail’ button on any product card. That will open an overlay, laid out as follows.

Merchandising rules

All merchandising rules contributing to the product score will be listed here. The green percentage figure next to the heading indicates how much the rules collectively contribute to the product score. Below that is a rule-specific breakdown of each rule’s contribution.

You’ll be able to see the following information detailed:

• The promoted/demoted field value
• The weight of the promotion/demotion
• The score contribution of the specific promotion/demotion

Do note that demotion rules lead to a promotion of all products that are not containing the specified field value. For example, a demotion of discounted products will, in fact, lead to a promotion of all non-discounted products. 

Want to make an adjustment to a specific rule? Simply click the rule name to jump straight to its editing menu!

Keyword matches (solely relevant for search results’ analysis)

This section will list all matches found between the search query and your product data (and, again, will show both their collective and individual contribution to the product score).

This is handy in helping you understand why and where a query is being matched with your product data, if you need to question anything.

For every match, you’ll be able to see the following:

• The field in which it occurred e.g. color, style
• The priority level of that field
• Whether the query stemmed before matching the product data, e.g. from a plural word like ‘dresses’ to a singular word like ‘dress’
• Whether a synonym you’ve configured led to the match, and if so, which synonym

Why use score insights

In short, score insights give merchants complete transparency into everything that could possibly be impacting product visibility within their search results pages, category pages, and product recommendation campaigns.

By serving this insight in a simple, digestible format, merchants are able to easily make adjustments to the likes of merchandising rules, searchable fields, and more, to further optimize their product visibility towards specific business goals.

Ready to dive in?

To get started, here are some suggestions of how you might want to start optimizing your product visibility with score insights:

1. Make sure the correct fields are all addressed in your merchandising rules to ensure desired products are boosted as expected
2. Check the score contributions of your promotion/demotion rules to determine if any weights need adjusting
3. Make sure that you’ve configured the right searchable fields within your product data, and that these are kept nice and concise, to ensure your products are pulling through as expected
4. Consider changing the priorities of your searchable fields if you’re seeing too high or low an impact of certain fields on your results pages
5. Look towards enriching your product data if you’re spotting missing keyword matches for certain queries
6. Think about adding more synonyms if you want to pull more results for certain queries (and similarly, reduce your synonym list if specific ones are leading to false matches)

Not yet using Nosto’s Search, Category Merchandising, or Product Recommendations?

If you’re an existing Nosto client and are curious to learn more about how score insights could be helping you, reach out to your CSM to schedule a product tour.

Not using Nosto at all but keen to learn more?

Our team of ecommerce specialists would be happy to chat.