Navigational Search Insights

A new insights tab in the Sorting Optimizer app recommends redirecting site visitors who search for a specific category to that category instead of showing the search results.

Category pages usually provide site visitors with a better experience by providing relevant filters, promotions, and products defined especially for the category. Also, using Sorting Optimizer provides a personalized experience that fits your business logic.

How it works

Using the Keyword Search event, all site visitor search queries are tracked and analyzed by AI to find those search queries in which users were actually looking for a category or a group of products and not a specific item. We call these “navigational search queries”. We then recommend either that you direct users to the relevant category we identified on the site, or create a new category if we didn't identify any matching category.

The Navigational Search Insights tab lists these queries from the past 7 days with the relevant recommendation for each query. If a query or its recommendation is not relevant you can dismiss it from the list.

Note the following:

• We only analyze search queries with at least 50 searches, and up to 200 queries from the past week.
• We use the page context to identify the site categories, so there might be instances when a category that hasn’t been visited or was falsely categorized isn’t identified in the insights tab. In that case, we’ll recommend creating a new category.
• If your site has more than 2000 categories, we might fail to identify the less-visited categories.

Redirect search queries to the relevant category

Create a web personalization campaign to redirect search queries to the relevant category:

1. In Web Personalization, create a new campaign and select the Custom Code campaign type.
2. Name your campaign (say, Redirect to category) and click Next.
3. Click New Variation and select the Redirect template (click Show More to ensure all the templates are visible).
4. In the Target URL field, enter the category you want to redirect the user to (for example, https://www.mysite.com/jeans) and save the variation.
5. You can test the redirect campaign by directing some of the traffic to a control group and monitoring the performance for each variation.
6. Click Next. In the Targeting tab, under Where, select the Current page URL condition and in the value enter the search query URL you want to redirect users from (for example, https://www.mysite.com/q/jeans). Note that you can use the “or” condition to redirect several queries like common mistakes, synonyms and so on. Click Next.
7. Save your campaign as a draft and test your setup as follows:
   1. In the campaign list, click the preview icon, enter your homepage in the Preview on field, and click Preview.
   2. On your site, do a search for the relevant queries and verify that you're redirected to the relevant category.
8. Publish your campaign.