Configure a Personalized Site Search Action

Follow these steps to configure a Personalized Site Search action in an Omnichannel experience.

At this time you can only use a Personalized Site Search action in Omnichannel experiences.

  1. Click EXPERIENCES in the top navigation bar, and then select Web.

    Callout of the Web option in the EXPERIENCES menu of the top navigation bar

  2. Click the arrow to the right of CREATE EXPERIENCE, and then select Omnichannel.

    Callout of the Omnichannel option in the CREATE EXPERIENCE selector

  3. Name the experience.
  4. Configure the WHY settings.
    1. Click WHY, select To serve everyone the same experience, and then click NEXT.

      You can only use a Personalized Site Search action with the 100% Experience type.

      Callout of the WHY settings, the 'To serve everyone the same experience' option, and the NEXT button in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

    2. Select a goal metric and then click NEXT.

      Callout of the goal metric options and the NEXT button in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

    3. Adjust the secondary metrics as needed, and then click NEXT.

      Callout of the secondary metrics options and a callout of the NEXT button in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

    4. Click SAVE.

      Callout of the SAVE button to confirm the WHY settings in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

  5. Configure the WHO settings as needed.
  6. Configure the WHAT settings.
    1. Click WHAT and then click ADD ACTION.

      Callout of the WHAT settings and of the ADD ACTION button in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

    2. Click Personalized Search.

      Callout of the Personalized Search option on the Action Type panel of the WHAT settings in a Omnichannel experience named 'Personalized Site Search'

    3. Select the Personalized Site Search template that you want to use.

      The Personalized Search panel of the WHAT settings, which has one Personalized Site Search action template

    4. Select a recommendation strategy. Refer to Recommendation Strategies for Personalized Site Search in this documentation for guidance on selecting or creating a recommendation strategy for this action.

      If you select a recommendation strategy configured with a product catalog that has not been mapped for Personalized Search, then an error message immediately appears.

      Callout of the 'Recommendation strategy' selector of the Personalized Site Search action template

    5. Optionally, add one or more action conditions. Click ADD CONDITION and then select and configure an option to set any conditions that must be met for the action to fire. See Action Conditions for more information.

      If you opt to add any action conditions, ensure that you configure them so that you don't inadvertently exclude any page of your site or any customers from the Personalized Site Search action.

      The action conditions attribute categories accessible from the ADD CONDITION selector on a Personalized Site Search action template

    6. Click CREATE.

      Callout of the CREATE button on a Personalized Site Search action template

  7. Configure the WHEN settings as necessary.
  8. Click ACTIVATE.

When you configure the Engine API request for the Omnichannel experience, ensure that you include any relevant context in the request. Refer to Personalized Site Search Queries in Calling the Personalized Search API in the Monetate Developer Hub for more information about configuring various aspects of the search functionality.

Contact your dedicated Customer Success Manager (CSM) if you need assistance writing the Engine API request.

Recommendation Strategies for Personalized Site Search

The products identified by a recommendation strategy become the products that are boosted in the results of Personlized Site Search and can impact the ordering of the products within those search results. Because of the ways that you can configure Personalized Site Search and because of how Personalized Search works behind the scenes, keep the following guidance in mind when choosing or creating a recommendation strategy to use in a Personalized Site Search action:

  • A collaborative recommendation algorithm provides better search results personalization than noncollaboratives ones.
  • Although there are no restrictions on which customer behavior context option you can select for a collaborative recommendation algorithm, Item(s) purchased in previous sessions could optimize the personalization of the search results better than other options.
  • If Prepend context item in recommendation is set to YES in the recommendation strategy, then the context product is boosted and thus more likely to appear in the search results.
  • If Item group ID(s) in custom variable is selected as the context option, then the custom variable(s) passed using monetate:context:CustomVariables significantly impacts the products that are boosted within the search results as well as the ordering of the products within the search results.
  • For the most part, avoid recommendation filters with dynamic values. One notable exception is the <attribute> of Product That Recommendation Is Based On dynamic value option.
  • You don't need to configure any Boost and Bury filters in the recommendation strategy to match any product-level boosting scores configured in Personalized Site Search. Any products that meet the recommendation strategy's Boost and Bury filter criteria are boosted or buried as appropriate in the search results.

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