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 using Merchandising tools.
Prerequisites
- Before a bury can be initiated, the Admin application area must be fully configured. Access to the Bury tab is configured in User Management in the Admin application area, on a per-user basis.
- To apply a bury action to specific pages, you need to have set up pages in Experience > Category & Landing Pages.
How to set it up
- Give your bury action a descriptive name (up to 50 characters) and set a start and end date.
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Select which markets the bury action should apply to. A bury can be active in several markets simultaneously. The system checks which of the selected products exist in each chosen market — the bury only applies to products available in that market.
A maximum of 100 buries and boosts can be active within a market. If this limit is reached, you'll need to reschedule or remove currently active buries or boosts to make room for a new one. -
Select which pages the bury action should apply to. Selecting a parent page automatically selects all child pages. To select only the parent page, hold Shift and select its checkbox. Individual sub-pages can then be selected or deselected in the interface.
Page names in italics indicate pages that are not visible and contain no products — selecting them only selects their child pages.
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Select products. You can select products manually or using a rule-based selection, specifying inclusion or exclusion. You can also combine both methods. When you select Save, you will see which products are included in your selection. Read more in the dedicated article about Product Selection.
How it 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 — such as 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 restricted to target predefined audiences from Voyado Engage. Audiences are created in Engage, not in Elevate. For details about audiences and segmentation in Engage, see Getting started with the filtering 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 in the Estimated Effect column.
The Buried Group column shows statistics for buried products. The Control Group column shows 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: An Estimated Effect of -67% in displays means that buried products are displayed 67% less than products in the control group.
To ensure statistical reliability, at least 500 sold units in the control group are required before the Estimated Effect can be calculated for Sold Units, Revenue, or Profit. If sold units don't reach that threshold, the impact cannot be accurately measured and no estimated effect will be shown.
If buries are restricted to specific audiences, the impact is only assessed within those audiences.
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 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 using the RELEVANCE sort order. Recommendation lists use burying when using the TOP_PRODUCTS algorithm, and partially use burying — specifically for product backfill — with the other recommendation algorithms.
Best practices
- Do not 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 the statistics of a bury to make sure it gives the result you want.
Duplicate a bury
To repeat a bury similar to a previously created one, use the Duplicate functionality. An editor for a new bury will open with all the settings of the original applied, ready to be adjusted if necessary. Statistics for the new copy 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.