When results are essentially the same as far as relevancy is concerned, then the next step is to promote the record you want based on the business relevance of the item itself. For example:
- The record thats the most popular
- The record thats the most profitable
- Records you want to promote for another reason (such as a promotion)
The best way to do this is with a custom ranking attribute: https://www.algolia.com/doc/guides/managing-results/must-do/custom-ranking/how-to/configure-custom-ranking/
You could add an attribute to your records that represents their popularity, so that more popular records will appear above less popular records when they have the same relevance. It's up to you how you determine 'popularity' and you'll need to add this to your records yourself.
Here are some sample metrics that can be used to determine popularity:
- Sales data
- User reviews
- Any external analytics data you have relating to your item's popularity
- The number of items that you have sold
- The number of views for a product page (if you are tracking views) *
* One thing to watch out for is self reinforcing metrics, for example using page views means that items with more views will rank higher which would naturally mean that they get more views which then means that they then rank even higher.
The best choice for you will depend on your particular use case, and indeed it would be a great time to use our A/B testing to try out different strategies.