Running your search day to day
Your catalog is indexed and search works. This guide covers what comes after: reading what your customers search for, fixing a ranking, and evolving the engine as your product lines change.
If you haven't indexed a catalog yet, start with the getting started guide: it covers signing up, the first import, and installing the optional modules. This one assumes all of that is already in place.
Dashboard — what to look at, and in what order
Two figures deserve your attention every week, and they aren't the most flattering ones:
- Zero-result searches. Each one is a customer who didn't find a product you may well carry. It's the single most profitable source of improvements.
- Click-through rate after search. If it drops while volume climbs, your results are degrading — often because a recently imported product line isn't well recognized yet.
The Conversion & ROI panel gives you the revenue attributed to search. Useful for weighing priorities, less so for day-to-day action.
My catalogs — what changes when you re-import
Re-indexing an existing product updates it, it isn't duplicated: the identifier is authoritative. So you can rerun your export as often as you like.
The rule pack is chosen per catalog. Changing it reindexes everything: annotations are recalculated with the new rules. Expect a few seconds on a large catalog, during which search keeps working on the old index.
Analytics — read before you fix
On the Search side
Popular searches tells you what your customers actually search for, often different from what you imagined. Zero results is the list to work through first — each line is usually fixed with a synonym or a custom rule.
Errors should stay empty. A line appearing there signals an integration problem on the site side, not the engine side.
On the Ranking side
Most-viewed products cross-references impressions on your category pages with clicks from search. The column that matters is the ratio: a product shown a lot but rarely clicked holds a good spot without earning it. That's a candidate for demotion — or a sign its listing deserves a better photo.
This screen needs the Heurix.trackCategoryView() call from your category pages. Without it, it stays empty.
Personalization — the four levers, from broadest to most precise
| Lever | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Synonyms | Your customers use a word your catalog doesn't. The most cost-effective, and the first to try. |
| Custom Rules | A term specific to your business slips past the industry pack. You describe what it should recognize, no regex to write. |
| Query priorities | A specific search should feature a product — a promotion, an exclusive. |
| Category ranking | The order of a department page, independent of any search. |
Always try in this order. A synonym fixes the problem for every affected query; a priority fixes only one. Setting a priority where a synonym would have been enough is treating the symptom.
The visual editor — see before you save
In both Rule management and Ranking & merchandising, you work directly with product cards:
- The pin puts a product at the top.
- The arrows, or dragging one pinned card onto another, shift the order by one spot.
- Apply saves it. Until you click it, your visitors still see the current ranking — that's what the amber banner signals.
A behavior that surprises at first: moving a product also locks the positions above it, so several rules appear from a single click. That's necessary — without it, your product would jump to first place instead of gaining one spot.
The preview's facets are there to check that a rule survives a visitor's filtering. The arrows are disabled there: they'd lock the displayed order, and on a filtered list they'd produce rules with no meaning once the filter is removed.
Three costly mistakes
- Pinning to fix a recognition problem. If a product doesn't come up on a legitimate query, the problem is upstream: a synonym or a Custom Rule. Pinning will hide the symptom on that query, and that query only.
- Stacking priorities without reviewing them. Check "Active rules" regularly: a finished promotion whose pin is still active keeps skewing your results.
- Ignoring zero-result searches. It's the console's most profitable list, and the least visited.
Going further
The API documentation details every endpoint if you want to automate. The getting started guide covers installation and the optional modules.