Since the release of our app in 2017, we have continually improved improve our Boost Product Filter & Search app for better usage, in response to your feedback.
Today, we’re excited to share with you 5 new features and significant updates that could help you optimize site search on Shopify stores, understand your customers better, and ultimately boost the conversion rate.
New features released:
Now, let’s get into the details.
A powerful tool to help you know in-store customers’ behaviors: Analytics
With this new Analytics feature, we’re making it easier for you to look into customers' shopping behaviors - to be exact, what keywords they are searching for, which product filter drives more sales, etc. - and then make strategic decisions from these data.
In the Overview Dashboard, we show you the most valuable filter & search metrics and insights into your Shopify store performance. You can capture the data instantly with detailed interactive graphs and thus analyze your customers’ interactions.
Aside from that, we also cover your 14-day Product Filter & Search performance analysis. It means that after the first 14 days of collecting your customers’ on-site activities in product filter, search, buying, etc. our app will be able to render and report the key metrics for you.
These data are then presented in two separate tabs: Collections Analytics and Search Analytics. You can view the detailed reports for in-store search and filter activities of your customers.
In particular, the trends in customers’ behaviors can be seen in the top keywords that customers use, and the filter options they chose the most. Hence, it’s easier for you to make inventory forecasts, find out best-selling products within a period of time, or promote certain products to boost sales.
→ Learn more about Analytics setup here: How to use Analytics.
→ You may also want to make the most out of the Analytics feature with Everything You Need to Know about Filter and Site Search Analytics Feature of Boost
Supercharge your store’s promotion campaign with Merchandising
We’ve added Merchandising as one of the main functionalities in the Product Filter & Search app. This feature includes Product ranking and Rule-based merchandising, to be your strategic tools to promote the right products automatically.
Product Ranking: prioritize the product’s position in search results
Product Ranking is a highly effective feature for you to decide which products to be promoted and align with your business strategy.
With 5 ranking options: No ranking (default), Always prioritized, Matched search, Keyword search, and At the Bottom, you can customize the order of products shown on your site within a chosen time.
For example, you can push products with large stock to the highest rank by choosing Always prioritized, while putting all out-of-stock products down At the bottom. What’s more, Matched search and Keyword search can be useful when you want to promote specific products at certain times depending on your plan.
→ To have a better grasp of this feature, take a closer look at How to use Product Ranking.
Rule-based merchandising
The Rule-based merchandising feature enables you to set rules with certain product attributes to create a group of product promotion conditions on the search result page.
You could quickly and instantly set up your conditions based on attributes like title, type, vendor, price, inventory, tag, etc. for your promotion campaigns.
→ For more details on setting up this feature, follow How to use Rule-based Merchandising.
Optimize customer’s search keywords with Synonyms and Stop words
We release Synonyms and Stop words features to help enhance your site search, thus helping customers navigate better on your website.
A couple of highlights from these two new features.
Synonyms
By common usage, synonyms are words that share the same meaning. In our app, Synonyms are used when you want to have different search terms that bring up the same search result.
These words can share relevant product variants or descriptive words that you don't have in your product data but your customers might want to search for.
Therefore, we develop this feature to optimize search results in the Search bar.
For frequently searched keywords that are unavailable in searchable data, you could prepare a number of synonyms and add them to the Synonyms list in our app. The search box would show the relevant results based on the list you created.
In settings, there are 2 types of different synonyms: Bi-direction (<=>) and Uni-direction (=>). If used strategically, synonyms can bring out the most relevant results that your browsers are looking for.
For instance, you want to show as many "bikini" products as possible, but there are other terms that customers may use to search like "bathing suit" and "swimsuit". In order to make the most out of a search result, the bi-direction synonym can be utilized in this case.
A bit different from bi-direction, uni-direction is used for alternative words of a search term but the alternative ones may not have the same meaning. In this way, customers can get the wanted results with general search keywords.
→ To get a better understanding of Synonyms feature, check out How to use Synonyms.
Stop Words
Stop Words is a particularly helpful feature to optimize relevant search results.
As it is developed to reduce the insignificant words in a search term, it will make our search show the results faster. Not to mention, this feature can help you hide the results that you don't want customers to view,
Say, a customer is looking for a "summer trending outfit" on your apparel site, the search results could possibly match either "summer", "trending" or "outfit" and return too many irrelevant products for the customers. Especially when the “outfit” is likely to go with numerous other collections and products, then excluding this word can return better results.
→ Learn more about how Stop Words feature works, check out How to use Stop Words.
Other updates you don’t want to miss - All for the best product searches
Aside from our 5 latest features above, we’ve also adjusted and added some improvements to assist you better in our app.
Tool Menu: Add Metafields page
Previously, if you wanted to create a filter option by metafields, you would have to contact us to set it up manually. We do realize that this process costs you time and effort.
Therefore, we came up with the Metafields page to remove your struggle and let you optimize the site search functionality easily by yourself.
This new feature enables you to track how many metafields are being added and their usage considering filter or/and search function.
Note that you can manually add up to 5 metafields to apply to your site’s filters and search based on Namespace and Key.
If you want to add more than 5 metafields, you can always send us a custom request.
Instant search display: Increase the highest number of displayed results from 5 to 10
Our Instant search widget display now enables you to show up to 10 items on each instant search suggestion type. In this way, you can promote not only products, but also collections, and other pages when customers search for a certain term.
Search settings: Expand more search fields
We’ve also added more search criteria in Search settings namely, product titles, SKU, barcode, description.
Therefore, when customers look for a keyword, the search results are more optimized following these fields. You are able to flexibly turn on/off the search options to match your products.
Also, prioritizing filter options by arranging their order to optimize your search settings has never been easier with drag and drop.
Unlimited only to product type, vendor, tag, or collection, your customers now have more options to search for the products they want, even with special characters.
Advanced settings: Match the minimum percentage of a search term to increase the precision
Now, you get to decide which percentage a keyword must match to get the results.
We divide the keywords your customers may use into two types: 2-word search term and 3-word and above search term (long-tail keywords) so that you can strategically adjust your site search settings accordingly.
A little note that for the best usage, we already set the default matching percentage to 100% and 85% respectively.
Have more ideas about what features we should build next? Shoot us a message on Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter.
See you soon with our next exciting feature updates!
