Every search result is the outcome of a lot of decisions you never normally get to see. Search Explorer is a glance behind the scenes, and the place to answer "why is this product here?". Search for any phrase and you'll see how Elevate reads it, which products it returns, and what put each one where it is. Nothing you do here changes what your shoppers see, so feel free to dig around. You'll find Search Explorer in the Experience application area, under Search tools.
Find Search Explorer
- In the Elevate dashboard, open the Experience menu.
- Select Search tools > Search Explorer.
- Select the market and locale you want to investigate.
- Enter a search phrase.
How Search Explorer is organised
Search Explorer has three panels, and they take you from the phrase down to a single product:
- Search phrase works at phrase level. It shows whether the phrase was corrected, how often your customers search for it, and every way Elevate interprets it.
- Search result shows the products the phrase returns, in the order a shopper in the selected market would see them.
- Product details opens when you select a product. It explains why that product matched, and what drives its position.
Auto correction
When your phrase closely resembles a phrase Elevate recognises, it's corrected automatically, in the same way autocorrection works on your site. Search Explorer shows the result and the statistics for the corrected phrase first.
Under Auto correction you can switch between the Corrected and Original phrase. Selecting Original re-runs the whole view against exactly what you typed.
Your shoppers get the corrected result too, so the original phrase isn't what they'd normally be served. It's still worth looking at, for two reasons. It shows you how much the correction is doing for that phrase, and if your site lets shoppers re-run their original phrase, it's the result they'll get when they do.
Search volume and importance
Some phrases are typed once and never come back. Other phrases are searched for constantly. Search Volume & Importance tells you which kind you're looking at, so you know how much weight to give what you find.
Importance is derived from how often the phrase is searched in the selected market, and is expressed as an importance tier: Minimal, Low, Moderate, High, or Top. Alongside the tier you'll see where the phrase ranks among all the phrases Elevate has stored for that market, for example #3 of 1 247 phrases.
If a poor result appears on a Minimal phrase, few customers are affected and it probably isn't urgent. The same problem on a High or Top phrase reaches far more customers and is worth prioritising.
You'll also see the number of searches in the last 24 hours, the last seven days, and the last 30 days, plus a graph of daily searches over the last 30 days.
A phrase won't be given an importance tier when there isn't enough data to place it, for example when too few customers have searched for it, or when there aren't enough stored phrases to compare it against.
Search intents
Rather than matching words one by one, Elevate works out every plausible way to read a search phrase. A phrase can be split in more than one way, and each part can point to different product attributes, such as a product type, a colour, or simply something in a product's name.
Search Intents shows each of those interpretations, and how each part of the phrase was mapped to an attribute and a value.
Intent letters
Each intent is labelled with a letter, starting from A and working through the alphabet in tier order. The same letter appears on the products in the search result that matched on that intent, so you can see at a glance which reading of the phrase produced which products.
Intent tiers
Tiers rank how likely each interpretation is, and each tier has its own colour.
- Tier 1 is what the customer most likely meant.
- Lower tiers are still plausible readings of the phrase, just less likely.
- Intents within the same tier are treated as equally good. There's no order of importance between them, so the letters A and B on two Tier 1 intents don't mean one is better than the other.
Tiers tell you the order of likelihood, not the size of the gap between them. The distance from one tier to the next isn't fixed, and it isn't the same all the way down: it can be some difference, or it can be a massive one. All a tier number tells you is that Elevate considers one reading more likely than another.
Intent is the strongest signal behind ranking, but it isn't the only one. A higher-tier interpretation gives a product a stronger starting position, and sales and other performance signals move it from there. That means a product matched on a lower tier can still outrank one matched on a higher tier.
Example: for the phrase long summer dress, one Tier 1 intent reads it as three separate attributes (a length, an occasion, and a product type), while another Tier 1 intent reads summer dress as a single product type. A Tier 3 intent reads the whole phrase as part of a product's name.
The search result
The middle panel shows the products the phrase returns, together with the total number of hits. The order is the relevance-sorted result a shopper in the selected market would get, based on the intent tier each product matched on combined with the ranking components that apply to it, such as its sales performance or a manual boost.
Each product card shows:
- Its position in the result.
- The letter of the intent its ranking is based on.
- Icons for the ranking components currently affecting it, for example that it's boosted, that it's new, or that it's missing an image. The icons correspond one to one with the ranking components listed in Ranking Strength.
Select a card to open the product details panel.
Search Match: why a product matches
Search Match takes the intents you saw for the phrase and shows you the one behind this particular product. Intent fit gives you its letter and tier, so you can tie the product back to a specific reading of the phrase. A product can match several intents, but the one shown is the best intent for that product, since that's the one its ranking is based on.
Above the intent, you can see what each part of the phrase matched on for this product. Matches that came from enriched data are highlighted, which tells you which of them Elevate worked out for itself rather than reading from your feed.
Enriched data isn't directly present in the product data you send to Elevate. Elevate's classifier reads everything you do send, including titles, descriptions, images, and your custom attributes, and draws conclusions from it to detect concepts such as occasion, style, or material. Those concepts are then added to the product automatically - this addition is what we call enrichment. This lets shoppers find products using words that describe the product, even when you never provided that information as an attribute of its own. For more information, see How Elevate understands and uses your product data.
Ranking Strength: what affects a product's position
Ranking Strength answers a different question from Search Match. Instead of showing how well the product fits this phrase, it shows how strongly the product stands on its own, before any particular search is taken into account.
That strength still shapes the search result. A product's position is a combination of the tier it matched on and its ranking strength: strength decides the order among products matched on the same tier, and a strong enough product can be placed ahead of products matched on a higher tier.
Catalog rank
Catalog rank is the product's position across the entire catalog, shown both as a position (for example #5 of 842) and on a scale from Bottom through Middle to Top 10%.
It's the combined figure, with every component listed further down feeding into it. The sections below break it into its parts.
Popularity
Popularity is narrower than catalog rank. It reflects the product's sales activity compared to other products in the catalog, measured against your exposure strategy, and is also shown as a position and on a scale from Rarely Sold through Average to Popular.
Exposure strategy
Elevate ranks products toward one chosen business goal at a time: conversions, revenue, or profit. Popularity is measured against that goal, so a product's popularity is relative to it rather than an absolute score. The strategy currently configured for the market is marked in Search Explorer.
You can select Conversions, Revenue, or Profit to see what popularity looks like when measured against a different goal. This only changes the popularity figures shown below the toggle. It doesn't change the search result, and it doesn't change your configured strategy. For more information, see Exposure strategies.
Sales figures and discount periods
Under the popularity scale you'll see figures for the last 24 hours, the last seven days, and the last 30 days, in the currency configured for the selected market, followed by a graph covering the last seven days. Both reflect the selected exposure strategy.
Discounted price periods are detected automatically and marked on the graph. Popularity is meant to reflect ongoing demand, not a temporary spike caused by a lower price, so Elevate's product life cycle analysis recognises when a sale is active and adjusts for it. A product that sells well on discount doesn't necessarily keep selling well once the price returns to normal, so a discount alone won't permanently inflate a product's popularity.
Ranking components
Below the popularity figures, Search Explorer lists the individual components that can move a product up or down. All components are always listed, whether or not they currently apply, so you can rule out the ones that aren't involved as quickly as you confirm the ones that are.
Each component carries a badge:
- Improves rank: the component is currently pushing the product up.
- Lowers rank: the component is currently pushing the product down.
- Varies by shopper: the effect isn't the same for every visitor.
- No impact: the component isn't affecting this product.
| Component | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Manual Boost | Whether a boost is applied to the product, and which boost it comes from. |
| Newness | Whether the product is new enough to receive a temporary ranking boost, and how old it is. |
| Personalisation | That a product's position can be tailored per shopper. The positions here are the baseline. |
| Availability | How well the product is covered in stock, for example how many of its variants are available. |
| Image data | Whether the product has an image. Products without an image are ranked lower. |
| Manual Bury | Whether a bury is applied to the product. |
What you can use Search Explorer for
- Understand why an unexpected product ranks high, or why a product you care about ranks low.
- See how a phrase is being interpreted, and whether those readings match what your customers are actually looking for.
- Spot where your own configuration is behind a position. A boost, a bury, or a synonym set up earlier can shape a result in ways that are easy to lose track of, and Search Explorer lets you see when one of them is the explanation.
- Use importance to judge whether a result is worth acting on at all.
- See which matches came from enriched data rather than from your own feed.
- Compare the corrected and original phrase to see how much autocorrection is doing for you.
Frequently asked questions
Visit the Search Explorer FAQ for answers to the most common questions.