Burying a product means temporarily lowering its visibility in product listings by reducing its strategy score — a dynamic value used by Elevate to determine how prominently a product should be shown. By burying a product, you override the automatic optimization to intentionally push it down in search results, category pages, and other placements across your site. Burying is useful when you want to deprioritize certain brands, seasonal items, or supplier-specific products without removing them from the catalog. When a product is buried, all of its variants (such as different sizes or colors) are buried as well. All bury actions are configured and managed in the Business application area.
Prerequisites
- Before a bury can be initiated, the Admin application area must be completely configured. Users' access to the Bury tab is configured in the User Management tab in the Admin application area, on a per-user basis.
- In order to apply a bury action on specific pages, you need to have set up pages in Experience > Category & Landing Pages.
How to set it up
1. Start by giving your bury action a descriptive name (up to 50 characters long) and a designated start and end date.
2. Select which markets the bury action should apply to. A bury can be active in several markets simultaneously. The system will then check which of the selected products exist in each chosen market. The bury action will only apply to those products that are actually available in the selected market.
3. Select which pages the bury action should apply to. Note that when you select a parent page all child pages are automatically selected. To select only the actual page, hold down the "Shift" key while clicking the checkbox. Individual sub-pages can then be selected or deselected in the interface.
Page names written in italics show pages that are not visible and do not contain products, so selecting them only selects all of their child pages.
4. Select products. You can either select products manually or by using a rule based selection, specifying inclusion or exclusion in the bury action. You can also combine manual and rule-based selection. When you click Save, you will see which products are included in your selection. Read more about selection in the dedicated article about Product Selection.
How it actually works
When you bury a product in Elevate, its strategy score is manually set to a lower level than that of products not affected by the action. The strategy score is what Elevate uses to rank products based on the selected exposure strategy—like conversion, revenue, or profit focus—combined with real-time sales data and shopper behavior.
By burying a product, you override this automated ranking, telling Elevate to treat the product as less relevant, even if it performs well. This causes the product—and all of its variants—to be pushed further down in listings such as search results and category pages. The product remains visible and available, but with significantly reduced exposure across your site.
Limiting buries to target audiences
When Voyado Elevate is integrated with Voyado Engage, a bury can be confined to target predefined audiences from Voyado Engage. Note however that the audiences are created in Engage, not in Elevate. For details regarding audiences and segmentation in Engage, refer to Getting Started with the Segmentation Tool.
Statistics and effects of a bury action
If you enable Track impact of bury in the settings of your bury action, you can see the effects of the bury in the column ESTIMATED EFFECT.
The BURIED GROUP column shows the statistics for buried products. The CONTROL GROUP column shows the statistics for normal (non buried) products. The ESTIMATED EFFECT column shows the impact of the bury using the difference between the first two columns.
The ESTIMATED EFFECT shows the relative increase or decrease in sessions, displays, clicks, sold units, revenue and profit, caused by the bury.
Example: If the Estimated Effect is - 67% in displays, it means that buried products are displayed 67% less than products in the control group, as an effect of your bury action.
Use cases for bury
Burying by supplier
If you work with third-party or dropship suppliers, you might need to deprioritize certain suppliers’ products—perhaps due to delivery issues, inconsistent quality, or pricing concerns. Burying helps ensure those items don’t dominate your most visible positions.
Burying specific product types
Some products—like spare parts, accessories, or low-interest maintenance items—might not be suitable to highlight in prominent places like search results or seasonal category pages. Burying them ensures your top-ranking results stay inspirational and aligned with your brand story.
Burying seasonal products
Out-of-season items (for example, winter jackets in spring or Christmas decorations in January) may still need to be searchable but should take a backseat in product listings. Burying helps push them further down the page while keeping them available for those who still want them.
Burying due to business rules
Sometimes, contractual or strategic considerations might mean certain brands or SKUs should not be highlighted prominently for a period. Burying gives you that control without needing to change your product data.
Burying underperformers temporarily
If a product is consistently returned, poorly reviewed, or underperforming despite good placement, you may want to bury it while assessing its issues—without fully removing it from listings.
Primary lists and recommendation lists
Primary lists and recommendation lists can incorporate burying. Primary lists make full use of burying when employing the "RELEVANCE" sort order. Recommendation lists employ burying when using the "TOP_PRODUCTS" algorithm, and partially employ burying, specifically for product backfill, with the other recommendation algorithms.
Best practices
- Do no use multiple include rules with the same attribute and different values within a rule set; instead use one include rule with one attribute and multiple values.
- Use rules for inclusion before rules for exclusion in a rule set
- Measure statistics of a bury to make sure it gives the result you want
Duplicate a bury
In order to repeat a bury similar to a previously created one, it is possible to use the Duplicate functionality. An editor for a new bury will open with all the settings of the old bury applied, ready to be tweaked if necessary. The statistics for the new, duplicate bury will start from a clean slate.
Viewing Creator and Editor information on Bury cards
Bury cards include attribution details to help users understand who created a card, who last edited it, and when those changes occurred. This improves transparency and makes it easier for teams to manage and review campaign configurations.
What you can see
Creator
The user who originally created the card.Most recent editor
The last user who made changes to the card.Timestamps
The date and time when the card was created and last updated.
Frequently asked questions about bury actions
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