Promoting a product without breaking your results
You're running a campaign on a range. The engine knows nothing about your promotion: it ranks by relevance. Here's how to take control of a few searches without upsetting everything else.
The instinct to resist
The temptation is to force the product everywhere. That's the surest way to see it surface on searches where it doesn't belong — a customer looking for something else gets your promotion, and you lose on both counts.
Effective merchandising is targeted: a few precise searches, the ones where the product genuinely belongs.
Choosing the right searches
Go to Observe → Searches and look at what your customers actually type around this range. You'll see the vocabulary they use — often different from yours — and the volume behind each query.
Two or three well-chosen queries beat fifteen approximate ones. Take the ones with volume, where your product really answers the need.
Pinning, in three steps
In Optimise → Search merchandising, type the query. You see the current ranking, exactly as your visitor would.
Click the pin on the product you want to promote: it moves to the top. Nothing is saved yet — a banner reminds you, and your visitors still see the original ranking.
When the result suits you, hit Publish. Only then does the rule take effect.
What happens if you move rather than pin
The arrows move a product one place. But for it to stay there, the engine must also lock the positions above it: a single click therefore creates several rules. That's expected, and the list shows you all of them before you publish.
If you simply want a product at the top, pinning is more direct.
A whole range at once
Pinning product by product works for three items, not three hundred. For an entire range, use Category merchandising, the By attribute tab: you promote every product sharing a brand, a family or a material.
One detail that avoids surprises: a per-product demotion always takes priority over an attribute-level boost. If you've explicitly pushed an item down, it won't come back up because its range is boosted.
After the campaign
A promotion ends; its rules don't. Note the end date somewhere, or get into the habit of reviewing your rules at the start of each month — in the Catalog rules tab, which lists them all with their creation date.
A forgotten rule is worse than no rule at all: it promotes a product you've stopped talking about, and you no longer remember why.