Experience Search Implementation Overview

Experience Search empowers your users to find what they're looking for: They can search with text or images, and see highly-relevant, semantically-related product results. This powerful solution is driven by Dynamic Yield Experience APIs, using your product feed as the core data source.

This guide outlines the essential steps to implement Experience Search. The process is slightly different for new versus existing Dynamic Yield customers. 

Implementation for existing Dynamic Yield customers

If you have already implemented the Dynamic Yield script, product feed, and standard event tracking, you can go live with Experience Search by completing the following steps:

Step 1: Configure searchable fields

Searchable fields are the specific fields within your product feed that the search engine uses to find products. Dynamic Yield searches only within these designated fields, making their selection and structure extremely important. Experience Search supports both image and text fields.

While our AI models are designed to handle some inconsistencies, the quality of your configuration directly impacts search performance and relevancy. When your feed and searchable fields are properly configured, search results are more accurate, and more relevant.

Recommendations for best results:

• Images: Use clear, high-quality product images, ideally with a white background.
• Text: Keep text fields structured and focused. They should contain only the data and terms you want users to search for — no extra content or unnecessary details.

Step 2: Implement the Experience Search API

Implement the Experience Search API

The Experience Search API is designed to make it easy to build a rich and dynamic search results page. Whether you're handling a basic search query or adding advanced features like filters, sorting, and pagination, the API provides the flexibility to create the experience you want.

You can choose to implement the API directly on the client-side or from your server, depending on your technical setup and preferences.

Step 3: Track product engagement

To fully understand the impact of Experience Search on your key metrics (like purchases and revenue), you must track product interactions that happen after search results are provided.

Actions include:

• Clicking a product
• Adding a product to a wishlist or cart
• Changing product attribute (like size or color)
• Opening a quick-view popup

Reporting these actions and events helps Dynamic Yield generate advanced analytics and performance insights related to your search experience, giving you the data you need to optimize and prove ROI.

Implementation for new Dynamic Yield customers

Step 1: Implement the Dynamic Yield script

The Dynamic Yield script does more than just render content—it plays an important role in data collection. For Experience Search, the script automatically assigns a unique user ID and session ID to each user and session. This happens just once per user or session, helping to ensure clean and de-duplicated data. 

The script also simplifies sending important client‑side e‑commerce events, which are necessary to power the search experience.

Although the script isn't strictly required for Experience Search, we strongly recommend using it. If you choose a server-side-only setup, you’ll need to retrieve, store and manage user and session IDs yourself.

Step 2: Upload your product feed

The product feed is your product catalog, synced with Dynamic Yield to power many core features of Experience OS, including Experience Search. It serves as the data source from which the search engine retrieves products to display in search results.

Step 3: Report e-commerce events

To get the most out of Experience Search, it's important to report both user engagement on the site and user-action-based events. These are used to track performance, enable A/B testing, and power personalization.

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