Managing Facets
This document is ONLY for the customers using the older version of the console. For the newer version, refer to the documentation here.
IMPORTANT: Since we are gradually migrating all our customers toward our new upgraded console, we would slowly deprecate the older version.
Faceting provides your visitors an interface to select desired field values (or product attributes or search listing page) in order to filter their search results.
Every time a user clicks a facet value, the set of results is reduced to only the items that have that value. Additional clicks continue to narrow down the search—the previous facet values are remembered and applied again.
At this point, it is very easy for the user to choose the right cookbook.
Hence, faceted search results provide an easy-to-scan, browsable display that helps users to quickly narrow down each search.
Advantages of using Faceted Search
- Increases product discoverability – Imagine scrolling through hundreds of products and hitting page after page only to feel exhausted and frustrated. This is what happens with users when they don’t find the products they are looking for. Faceted navigation solves this problem in multiple ways.
- Least number of clicks to the desired products page – Faceted search helps your site users to skip the tiresome task of scrolling through a huge list of products and mindless browsing through tons of pages. With very few clicks, faceted navigation takes the user to the desired product. A user can quickly find a product and also go back and forth through different products with utmost ease and less amount of pain.
- Higher Conversion Rate – Helping users reach their products of interest soon helps them reach a buying decision and purchases.
Facet Features
The various features of implementing facets are mentioned below.
-
Multiselect Facet
This feature provides your visitors an option to select multiple values within a facet field or across facets fields. For example, for a query, “shoes”, you show facets on brand and size fields. If a visitor selects Nike in the brand facet field, other values in the brand facet field and field values of the size facet field will also be visible to the visitor. The search results will be refined according to the selection. Multi-select faceting is based on filter operations, that is, AND and OR.
AND
This operation will filter products that satisfy all the specified filter conditions. In other words, the results will be inclusive of those products that have all the filter fields.
OR
This operation will filter products that satisfy at least one of the specified filter conditions. In other words, the results will be inclusive of all the products that has at least one the filter fields.
- Displaying Exact Value Count of Facets: The facet algorithm of Unbxd provides you with an exact count of values for each facet present on your website. This helps your customer to know exactly how many products are present in each facet.
- Modify default limit: This feature enables you to specify the maximum number of constraint counts (essentially, the number of facets for a field that are returned) that should be returned for the facet fields.
- Sorting in Facet: Configuration can be set by Customer on console for sorting facet values by:
Product Count
Alphabetical order - Flexibility to Modify Facet Position: Unbxd provides a simple drag- and-drop option on console to modify the position of facets on your website, according to your business needs. For example, if you have configured the facets “Brand” and “Color”, you can modify the relative position of these facets on your website using the drag-and-drop operation in our console.
- Different Facets for Different Category Pages: Unbxd lets you customize facets according to your requirements. You can configure different facets for different category pages. For example, a category page “shirts”, the facets could be gender, brand, color, size, and Price, but for a category page “smartphone”, facets could be brand, color, RAM, OS etc. You can set the order for these facets in terms of position with respect to each other.You can also rank the facets values according to product count/alphabetical order depending on the use case. Unbxd provides an easy way in console to do so.
- Flexibility to Modify the Gap between Range Facets: Range Facets are configured on numeric fields in the catalog (essentially fields whose values are of numeric datatype). For example, Price, Discount, Offer etc. You can specify the span of the range as a value to be added to the lower bound.The span of each range is expressed as a value to be added to the lower bound. For example, for facet “price”, for query “mobile”, values are “35000.0” , 4,
“37500.0”, 6,
Here the gap is 2500.
But if we wish to increase or decrease the gap between the price facet value, we can achieve this by using f.price.facet.range.gap parameter on requests. - Breadcrumbs: The breadcrumb parameter gives the position within the category hierarchy where the results appear.
- Disabling Facet: If the client has configured facets, the defaults facets are sent in response if Unbxd search api is fired. In case, client wants to disable facet, sending facet=false (default value is true) along with request will disable facet in response.
Facet Types
Text facet
Text facets are configured on text fields in the catalog (essentially fields whose values are of text type). For example, color, brand, size etc.
For facet “brand”, for query “mobile”, values are samsung (663), HTC (513) and so on. This means for query mobile, under brand facet, we have Samsung, HTC as filters (values) and the total number of products available with that value is also sent. Shoppers can select any value among ( Samsung , HTC ..) and that value will be applied as a filter in the search query.
Range Facet
Range Facets are configured on numeric fields in the catalog (essentially fields whose values are of numeric datatype). For example Price, Discount, Offer etc.
For Range facet, we send the start of the facet range and number of product counts between current value and subsequent value. For example, for facet price, for query “mobile”, values are
“35000.0”, 4,
“37500.0”, 6,
This means, four products are available between the price range ‘35000 and 37500’.
Six are available between the price range ‘37500 and 40000’.
On the console, you can set the start and end range of the facets with the gap mentioned.
Range Facets allow you to modify the way you want to display facet values by letting you do the following:
- Modifying the gap of range facet
- Modify the start of range facet
- Modify the end of range facet.
Multilevel Facet
You can delete existing campaign or delete keywords while retaining the campaign. To delete only the keyword, click the query rule, click the edit icon. Delete the keywords from the Query rule window. To delete the query rule, click the delete icon.
- Mobile & Tablets
- Smartphone
- Electronics
Using multilevel faceting, You can apply the view number of products present in each category and apply these filters directly to narrow down our search.
Multilevel facet can be created by adding a ‘path’ field in the product catalog. The ‘path’ field(s) contains hierarchy information used to generate multi-level facets. Also, the same ‘path’ field can be configured as multi-valued field in order to support 2 or more than 2 types of hierarchy information for the same product type.
Unbxd API always responds with the category values belonging to each level.
- When no facets are selected(or no filters are passed): API responds to the facets belonging to the first level of the category.
- When first level of facets are selected: API responds with the second level of category values.
- When second level of facets are selected: API responds with the third level of category values.
Schema support for changing MultiLevel Facets
Once the feed with ‘path’ fields is uploaded, multi-level facets can be configured from the console by generating a facet on the ‘path’ field. For example the ‘ProductType’ field (in the image below) is a ‘path’ field, hence creating a facet on ‘ProductType’ would enable a multi-level facet on the ‘ProductType’ attribute.
Multilevel facet can be created by adding a ‘path’ field in the product catalog. The ‘path’ field(s) contains hierarchy information used to generate multi-level facets. Also, the same ‘path’ field can be configured as multi-valued field in order to support 2 or more than 2 types of hierarchy information for the same product type.
Products |
Product Type |
Relationship |
p1 |
Electronics>Accessories>Computer & Tablet accessories>Cases & Bags , Home>Luggage & Travel Accessories>Travel Accessories |
|
p2 |
Electronics>Accessories>Computer & Tablet accessories>Cases & Bags |
Gifts> For Mother |
p3 |
Electronics>Accessories>Computer & Tablet accessories>Cases & Bags , Home>Luggage & Travel Accessories>Travel Accessories |
Gifts> For Mother |
‘Product Type’ is a multi-valued path field that supports two different hierarchies for the same product.
In the above case product p1 would simultaneously be part of hierarchies “Electronics>Accessories>Computer & Tablet accessories>Cases & Bags” and “Home>Luggage & Travel Accessories>Travel Accessories”.
Here, ‘Product Type’ is a multi-valued path field that supports two different hierarchies for the same product.
The ‘path’ field in ‘productType’ can be defined as-
{ "fieldName": "productType", "dataType": “path ", "multiValue": true, "autoSuggest ": false, "isVariant ": true }
Configure Facets
Facets are applied on field values to narrow down the search results. Faceted search is composed of multiple filters to describe a set of fields. By applying facets, shopper’s experience is enhanced by showing them specific results to their search queries. The queries by the shoppers can be either generic or specific. Suppose a shopper types a query ‘shirt’ which is quite a generic query, then the search results on the Product Details Page (PDP) show all the results related to shirts.
But if the shoppers were actually looking for a Nike shirt, then filtering on brand ‘Nike’ would help the user get to the desired result sooner.
Facets are defined for a product and may not overlap with other product facet listing. When a catalog is uploaded, you can define some of the fields as facet fields. When you define your facets, you can configure them for each product by defining site rules and field rules in the merchandising section.
You can sort the facet values by:
- Product count: Allows you to sort the list by the number of products present in the inventory.
- Alphabetical order: Allows you to sort alphabetically.
Types of facets
- Text: A Text facet is a type of filtering that takes up text values defined in the schema file as String values. For instance: brand, color, etc.
- Range: A Range facet sorts the products based on prices and dates that take up numeric values. : If the facet is of the ‘range’ type, then define: Range Start– lower limit of a facet range Range End– Upper limit of a facet range Range Gap– interval between the two values of a facet range You don’t have the option to sort the order.
- Multi-value facets: They defines the products in multiple levels. In a feed, a field can be indexed as multi-value if the fields contain a list of comma separated values which defines their hierarchical path.
Create facet
When you navigate to the Configure Facet screen, you can see a list of pre-existing facets with their display name, field attribute, and facet type (text or range).
To create a facet:
- Within the console, navigate to Manage>Configure Site> Configure Facet.
- Click the doner menu icon and click New Facet.
- Provide a facet name in the Display Name text field.
- Select an attribute from the Select Attribute drop down list. If the facet type is defined as:
Text: You can edit the facet length and sort order and the value of facet type changes to Text.
Range: You can edit the facet length and the value of facet type changes to Range. - You can also alter the Facet Length which is the length of the facet name.
Once done, click Save and the defined values will be applied.
NOTE: The default value is five which defines that the facet name should be greater than 5 characters. The maximum value is 50.
Edit Facets
Field Rules allow you to display product-specific filters for search queries belonging to a certain type/category. While facets under Site Rules are displayed for all queries across the site, Field Rules allow you to override them for queries for certain type/category.
You can edit an existing facet to modify the “display name” of the facet. All other fields are locked and cannot be edited after you have created and saved it. Though the facet fields are non-editable, you can still set different facets for different fields or site rules.
To modify facets in the site rules, navigate to the Site Rule section in Merchandising.
Delete Facets
You can delete an existing facet permanently.
To delete a facet:
- Navigate to Manage > Configure Site > Configure Facet.
- To delete an existing facet, click the delete icon.
When you click the delete icon, the facet will be deleted permanently.
ALERT: Once a facet is deleted, you cannot recover it.
Upload/Download Facets
You can have a copy of all the facets by downloading all the existing facets in a single file. You can also upload all the facets in a zipped file format. Note: The uploaded facets are appended to the current facets and do not replace the existing ones.
To upload/download a facet:
- Navigate to the doner menu icon and click Bulk upload/download.
- When you click the icon you can see a zip file containing the list of all the current facets. You can download the zip file by clicking the Download icon against it.
- To Upload, you can drag and drop or upload the .csv file of all your facets.
Once, the file is selected click Done and the file will be uploaded/downloaded.
NOTE: You can download/upload facets only in the .csv format.
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On this Section
- To create a Query Rule
- To Edit a Query Rule
- Delete a Query Rule
- Campaign States
- Create Campaigns
- Edit Campaigns
- Preview Campaigns
- Duplicate Campaigns
- Delete Campaigns