Hi Team! We are scoping out an answers build, and they are looking to have all of their content surface from their three different sites: Main Site with a Marketing focus, A Zendesk Support Site for customers, and a LMS site. This in and of itself shouldn’t be an issue, as it will just take content accumulation from multiple locations. However, they want all of the content from each of these data sources to surface on each site with the content prioritization being different on each site. So, on their main site, they want content to surface from each of the three sites but to prioritize the main site marketing content. As an example, they would want both product information from the main site and login information for said product from the support site. It was passed along that we could utilize query rules to produce different results based on each of the different locations a query is coming from (legal & general america was the example), but will this work to bury verticals in each location? The other solution that made sense to me was to build out multiple frontends and backends for their team for the content prioritization, however I assume that comes with an added cost. I would love to understand best practice prior to starting this build!
Hey Davis,
I think the best way to achieve this is to make a single experience that utilizes broad query rules to holistically adjust content ordering based on where the search is coming from. You could theoretically create multiple experiences but maintaining all of these simultaneously would be cumbersome.
I’d suggest keeping the following things in mind as you consider the proposed strategy:
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Create a single-option select field that specifies which particular site that entity is coming from. Do this for every single entity you bring in from the three sites.
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For each entity type, create a saved filter for content from each site. For example, assuming there are faqs on each site, you’d have saved filters for “Main FAQs”, “Zendesk FAQs”, “LMS FAQs”. This will come in handy when you build out the query rules later. You can use the custom field from step 1 to do this easily.
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Now you can create three query rules for each of the three sites. These query rules will depend on the same criteria:
referrerPageURLRegex**. This will allow you to differentiate between searches coming from the three different URLs. Within these three query rules, you can add as many actions as you need to control ordering of results for that particular site. -
For any vertical that ONLY has content from one of the sites that you may want to boost above other content, you can create an action to boost the vertical intent for searches coming from that particular site. If there are any verticals that have no content from the particular site that you want to push below everything else, you can bury the vertical by giving it a negative boost value.
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For verticals that share content from multiple sites, you can create an action for each. Let’s say you have FAQs from each site all within a single FAQs vertical. Set up an action within each of your three rules to boost the entities within the three faq saved filters you created for each site. Do this for each vertical sharing content, and that site’s portion of the content will always be boosted for each vertical.
Let me know if you have any questions about this approach.
Best,
DJ
@DJ_Corbett this is so helpful! I have one or two questions about the specific actions that you can take:
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As a clarifier, if I had FAQs from multiple different locations, I would want to create a filter for each entity type and site data source. From there, would I be able to boost and bury each of those filters in the same query rule depending on the required action? I haven’t utilized multiple actions in a query rule so that is just a bit new to me.
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We would only be able to assign a negative vertical boost value if the entities were not shared, right? As an example, if I was on the main site and I wanted a query to produce blog content, but there is blog entities coming from both the main site and support site. In this situation, the boost value couldn’t weigh within the vertical itself, correct? Like the Main Site Blog Articles can’t be 10 if the Support Site Blog Articles are -10. Let me know if this doesn’t make sense…
I don’t think they will have a lot of crossover on verticals, but there may be one or two cases. Appreciate the input!
Hey Davis,
- Yes, for all actions that you want triggered off of the same criteria, you’d include all of those actions within the same query rule. You can theoretically add as many actions as you want to a single rule.
- I’m not sure I understand what you mean by the second question; a single vertical can only be boosted in one direction. If you wanted separate blog verticals for the main site blog and the support blog, you could have two separate verticals that are boosted separately depending on the site. If you wanted to, for example, filter out support blog entities completely when on the main site, you could just use the query rule to add a saved filter to the vertical that includes only the main site blog entities. In terms of “boost values weighing within the vertical itself”, that is what my final bullet in the original reply describes. You could boost particular entities within a vertical on top of any vertical-level boosting/burying you decide to do.
Thanks for clarifying the first question! On the second one, I definitely could have worded it better. I think a simplified version would this: if I set up saved filters within a vertical, could I boost a saved filter for Main Site FAQs and simultaneously bury a Support Site FAQ filter? Just to prioritize certain content over the other depending on where a query comes from. Again, this is all helpful!
Yep! You could have one action that boosts all of the Main Site FAQs and another action that buries all of the Support Site FAQs. Then, the LMS FAQs would end up in the middle of those two groups of entities. You will have to ensure there is no overlap between the various saved filters.