3 Ways To Use Boost and Bury Rules in Bloomreach Discovery To Improve Conversions

For ecommerce merchandisers, boosting and burying are powerful tools that can drive significant results. And with Bloomreach Discovery, this is even easier — by freeing up time from dealing with manual tasks, merchandisers can focus on the tasks that matter most, like increasing conversions. 

Here are three ways to approach your boost and bury rules in Bloomreach Discovery to help improve your key metrics. 

Use Timed Rules Instead of All-Time Rules

Most tips around boosting and burying are dependent on the use case, and this one’s no exception. In general, you don’t want to use all-time rules. This goes back to dealing with manual tasks — as you add more boost and bury rules, you’ll find yourself quickly inundated with a complex web of potentially conflicting rulesets. 

So, trust the Bloomreach Discovery algorithm (after all, it’s backed by the largest ecommerce dataset) and use timed rules instead. These are especially useful for sitewide promotions, seasonal events, and new product launches. You can even schedule multiple ranking rules for the same query or category, which is great for back-to-back campaigns like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

Once your timed rules expire, you’ll be able to dig deeper into what worked and what didn’t, then apply those learnings to your next set of rules to improve your conversion rate. 

Know When To Act Globally vs. Locally

Your boost and bury rules can affect your entire site or just a specific page, so knowing when to use which rules will save you time and help you be more effective. Global rules are good for when you want to push high-margin items and new arrivals, or when you want to impact the entire shopping journey. You can also use global rules to bury out-of-stock and out-of-season items, as well as products with high return rates, as these aren’t going to help your conversions. 

Meanwhile, on the local level, not all categories are shopped the same way as subcategories. For example, you may find that shoppers tend to purchase a brand’s jackets at a higher rate than their other clothes. In this case, you can set a rule to boost that brand within the jackets subcategory, but not within the broader clothing category. For local rules, you’ll want to monitor and analyze shopper behavior and adjust rules per category as needed. 

Don’t Overlook Attribute-Based Merchandising

Boosting attributes is a powerful tool within Bloomreach Discovery, and it’s one that’s often overlooked. Unlike product ranking (where you boost or bury specific products), attribute ranking is based on characteristics that can span multiple products (e.g., boost all items that are made of metal). 

For instance, let’s say you want to clear out stock while appealing to your customers’ sense of FOMO. In Bloomreach Discovery, you can boost based on a “low stock” attribute — you can then pair that with marketing messaging and on-site banners to get customers to convert before the items are sold out. 

You can also try boosting attributes for high-margin items, season codes, and more. Plus, if there are conflicts between a boost rule and a bury rule, the bury rule will take precedence. That means you can apply attribute boosts and then bury based on other attributes to create higher-converting pages. 

Take Advantage of Bloomreach’s Merchandising Features

These are just a few ways to use boost and bury rules to your advantage, but there’s a lot more you can do with Bloomreach Discovery (including AI-driven innovations). Next up, try exploring the differences between algorithm-driven and rule-driven recommendations. Then, apply those tips to boost revenue across your site. Happy merchandising!