When results are essentially the same as far as relevancy is concerned, then the next step is to promote the record you want to promote based on the business relevance of the item itself. For example this could be:
- 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/
So you would want to have an attribute on your records that represents the popularity of a particular record, such that you would want it to appear higher in the results than other records that are an equal match for your user's search as far as relevance is concerned. You would generate the data for this popularity attribute yourself based on the metrics you want to use to measure popularity.
Here are some metrics that can be used for a popularity metric:
- Your 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