Working with Burying¶

"Bury" is a method to temporarily reduce the strategy score of selected products and variants in a market. It is useful for scenarios like lowering the visibility of a supplier's products, minimizing the prominence of seasonal wear, or reducing the prominence of certain brands or types of products. A reduction will hide products in search results, category pages, and other locations where reductions are supported. All reductions are managed in the Business app.

Before a "bury"" can be created, the Admin app must be fully configured. Access for users to the "bury" tab is set in the Admin app User management tab on a per user basis.

Bury basics¶

Each "bury" is identified by a name and has start and end date, and is active in one or more markets. The maximum length of a the name of a bury is 50 characters. During the bury, the strategy score of each product is adjusted to be lower than all products which are not part of a bury, thus being buried in results. Statistics are collected during the bury and can be measured. All variants of a product will get individual rankings based on the variant performance and burying. A bury can be restricted to only be active in selected categories.

It's advisable not to have too many active burying or boosting actions simultaneously. An excess of these actions can lead to unexpected results and necessitate a significant amount of manual work.

Markets¶

A bury can be active in one or more markets at the same time. The selected products and variants of the bury are based on the products and variants present in the current market in the apps.

Statistics¶

During a bury period, aggregated statistics for all buried products/variants are collected for displays, clicks, sold units, revenue, and profit. Revenue and profit are shown in the currency configured for the current market.

Statistics can be measured to show the impact of the bury. When activating measurements, 80% of the sessions will show the bury and 20% will not. The impact is measured by comparing the statistics from sessions with bury to sessions without bury. The aggregated statistics of a bury are based on all sessions, i.e. both sessions with and without bury.

Notification set-up and implementation affects the statistics collected. Incorrectly set notifications will result in incorrect statistics. It is not always recommended to measure bury.

Selecting products and variants¶

Products used in a "bury" can be either handpicked or included (or excluded) by rules. Variants can only be included (or excluded) by rules.

Handpicked¶

Products can be handpicked for a "bury". The Search box can be used to search for products using the search attributes configured for the products, including product_key. Up to 700 products can also imported via the menu in the top right hand corner of the dialogue window. Hand picked products can be removed from a bury directly from the main Edit bury dialogue window. A bury of a hand picked product buries all the variants of the product.

Products can be easily handpicked on all markets in a bury, by selecting the multimarket option. To be able to perform multimarket handpicking, the cross market product key attribute and market must been configured in the Admin app. This is particularly useful when there are multiple products in the product data that refer to the same physical product on several markets. A product that is handpicked on all markets is indicated in the interface by a globe icon in the top left-hand corner of the product image.

Rule based¶

Products and variants can be included in, and excluded from, a bury using one or more rule sets. A rule set can include several rules where each rule can either include or exclude products/variants where a configured attribute, such as a brand name or a product category, has one or more values found in Elevate.

Products will be buried if only product attributes are used. If at least one variant attribute is used in the rule, the bury will be set to the variants matching the rule. If an attribute is a product attribute or a variant attribute depends on the data model setup and how attributes are used in the product import. If a product does not have variants the product itself is seen as a variant.

If more than one value is selected for an attribute in a rule, the values are to be considered as using the logical OR operator. I.e. if a rule with the attribute brand has both Adidas and Nike as values, products with brand configured as Adidas or Nike will be selected.

Each additional rule in a rule set is based on the data returned by the previous rule (logical AND operator). The final product and variant selection within the rule set is based on the data returned by the last rule. This is useful when narrowing down a product set. For example, a rule set has two include rules where first rule has the attribute brand and the value Adidas, and the second rule has the attribute color and the value Black. The final product selection within the rule set are products with the color set to Black from the data set where the brand is Adidas.

It is not recommended to use different rules using include with the same attribute within a rule set as they most likely return no products. I.e. if a rule set has two include rules where first rule has the attribute brand and the value Adidas, and the second rule also has the attribute brand but the value Nike, it will not return any products or variants at all. This is because no products and variants with Nike as brand are present in the data returned where brand is Adidas.

Several rule sets can be used simultaneously. The rule sets operate independently of each other (logical OR operator).

Individual products included by a rule set can be excluded if they are are deemed unfit for the bury. The products can either be excluded using a rule to exclude products and variants by their id's or by selecting them individually in the bury details view. Selected products are dimmed with a text denoting that they are blocked.

Restricting burys to categories¶

A bury can be restricted to only be active in selected categories. The available categories are defined by the product selection in the bury. The Related categories option only show categories with products affected by the bury while All categories also show the categories where there are no products affected.

Selecting a category will automatically include all sub-categories of the selected category. Sub-categories can also be individually selected and deselected in the interface.

Use cases¶

Key use cases includes burys of a specific suppliers products, burys of a product type (like spare parts), and burys of seasonal products.

Best practice¶

• Do no use multiple include rules with the same attribute and different values within a rule set, instead use one include rule with one attribute and multiple values.
• Measure statistics of a bury if needed.
• Use rules for inclusion before rules for exclusion in a rule set.
• Define the product selection before restricting a bury to categories.

Panels supporting burys¶

Depending on what panel is used, burys are utilized either fully or partially. Panels that partially utilize burys, such as the Autocomplete panel, use product burys on product backfill. Multi-level sorting will affect burys.

When restricting a bury to a category, the panel argument selected_category must be used.

burys are fully utilized in:

• Product list panel, when using relevance or sales as sort order
• Product list with count zone, when using relevance or sales as sort order
• Search hits panel, when using relevance or sales as sort order
• Search hits with count zone, when using relevance or sales as sort order
• Search zone when using relevance or sales as sort order

burys are partially utilized in:

• Product list panel, when using personal as sort order
• Product list with count zone, when using personal as sort order
• Autocomplete panel
• Did-you-mean panel
• Product suggestions panel