Promotions Tab

Site Search > Relevance > Relevance Modeling > Promotions Tab

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Promotions allow you to select specific content pieces to show up at the top of results pages. This allows you to execute a content strategy that pulls highlighted pages to the top of your results based on timeliness (for seasonal content) or for high intent keywords.

Sections:

• Simple Promotions
• Search Features
• External Promotions

Simple Promotions

The Promotions Tab of the SearchStax Site Search solution’s Model Details screen lets you “promote” a result item to the top of the list of matching items. Multiple results can be promoted and their order defined. 

First, create or select a promotion from the list:

The next step is to enter a query that will trigger this promotion. In this case, the promotion will be triggered when the search query contains the phrase “service limits” or, alternately, “request limits.”

At the top of this image is a checkbox that enables/disables the promotion. This is convenient for seasonal promotions that you might want to reuse next year.

Click the (+) button to enter another trigger phrase. Multiple triggers are ORed. Any one of them will activate the promotion.

Note that the promotion can be triggered by either an “Exact Match” or a “Contains” match.

• Exact Match: The search string must exactly match the trigger phrase. Any variation will invalidate the match.
• Contains: The search string must contain all of the words used in the trigger, but can have other words as well.

The “Contains” match does not do substring or regex matching. The match is based on whole words only.

Search Features

For “indexed” promotions, you have to find an indexed item and connect it to the trigger phrase. If you have a large index, finding the item can sometimes be a challenge. There are two search modes used for nominating a list of potential index items to promote. One is a general search; the other is highly specific.

Default Search

The default search mode works for most common searches. Just enter a keyword or phrase and see a list of matching results. In this case, we searched for documents containing “service limits.” Solr returned 230 indexed results. The highest-scoring matches appeared in the left-side column. As it happens, the perfect candidate was at the top of the list.

Click on any item to copy it to the Promoted Items column. This links the trigger phrase to this specific indexed item.

You may add up to ten indexed items to this list. The promoted items can be ordered using Move Up and Move Down buttons. 

When Site Search receives a query about “service limits,” the promoted item(s) will appear at the top of the results list. Each promoted result contains a special field value ([elevated]:true) so your search page can emphasize that result as special in some way. 

Basic Search is usually adequate to find the items you want to promote, but sometimes the result list is very long. To avoid paging and scrolling, you could try the Advanced Search.

Advanced Search

Sometimes you know exactly which item you want to promote. If you know the item’s ID number or URL, among other fields, you can target it more specifically.

Advanced Search uses Solr’s field:value syntax, such as url:“https://www.searchstax.com/docs/backups/”. In the example below, we used the Advanced Search to locate that specific document and then add it to the promotion.

Other examples of valid searches:

• id:”ed55498c-1f34-395d-963f-c79e1679ffee”
• tm_X3b_en_content_type:”blog” +meta_author:”Tom”
• navigationtitle_t_fr:”psychologie clinique programme”
• year_published:2022

External Promotions

In addition to promoting content from your index, you can also promote external items, such as event sites, partner pages, advertisements, and commerce.

First you will need to create an External Item. This item appears in the left column of the External Items view of the Promotions Tab.

1. Go to the External Items tab.
2. Click Create.
3. Enter a title, description and URL, then finish creation. (You cannot use the same URL for more than one external item.)

You can always go back to edit these fields or delete any external item you created.

Click the external item to move it to the Results list. Remember to Publish the change. When triggered by the appropriate query string, the external item will appear like a banner at the top of your results.