The Search Popularity Boost feature in the EvolutionX ecommerce system is designed to enhance the relevance of search results by prioritizing popular products. This feature calculates a product's popularity based on store sales, and assigns a higher score to popular products, thus listing them higher in the search results.

EvolutionX set's popularity as the number of times an item is added to the cart in a month. This means the higher the number, the more popular the item is. The value considered "high" is subjective to the store and catalog.

The Popularity Boost feature of Search does not replace the product relevance in search results, but rather complements it. The aim is to ensure that customers find what they are looking for while also listing popular products ahead of similar products. For example, if a customer is searching for red pens, the most popular red pen will be listed higher than the least popular ones, but relevance to the search term still plays a significant role.

The popularity value is automatically calculated for the catalog based on store sales. However, you can also import your own values, which will override the store calculated value (see more in the Enabling section below).

The next step is to set the amount of boost. This is found in the Admin→Settings→Product Search→Popularity Boost. Most users set it at the maximum, which results in a weighting of 60% to the search term relevance and 40% to the boost.

The boost score is typically based on how many times a product is ordered (number of lines, not quantity) per month. However, this is a guide and could be artificially inflated.

EvolutionX will automatically set a popularity score weekly for all items based on the number of times the item is on a line in a cart in one month. This is set per catalog and so a managed catalog will have a score based on activity from multiple stores.

You can import your own popularity score and this will override the value calculated weekly. As guidance, we would recommend a similar number that is based on the number of times it's ordered in a month. To import a popularity score in the Admin→Products→Import.

It's important to note that using features such as product priority to hard set the order of search results is not recommended as it can cause more problems than it solves in search. Using Popularity Boost is a good solution because it still allows the product search relavance to help return the product the customer is searching for based on key words found in product content. Refer to our notes here if you are setting a value for popularity using the Admin or Imports.

When testing the Search Popularity Boost feature, be sure to open an incognito browser session for each search test because search results are cached per session.

When the Search Popularity Boost feature is enabled, the rank of the popular product should move up compared to when the feature is turned off.

The Search Popularity Boost feature in EvolutionX is a powerful tool that can help enhance the shopping experience for your customers by prioritizing popular products in search results. However, it's important to understand how it works and how to properly set and test the boost to ensure optimal results.

There are many tools to influence product search which you can read about in our docs:

Popularity boost isn't for this but it is great for ensuring that relevance of a product is increased for popular products within normal search results. If a blue pen is searched, the more popular blue pens should rank higher than others that match on the same terms.

To list your top items at the top of a search go to the marketing module, setup a merchandising group and container to list items based on words searched and then add a merchandising items widget to your search results layout so they appear above the results.