Q4 saw us at Constructor continue to focus on what’s important: driving revenue and conversions for our customers. We’ve released some new functionality and fixes for which we’ve seen fantastic adoption, and our experiences with Black Friday and Cyber Monday were even better than we expected. We recently wrote an article on this topic — you can check it out here!
We’ve also released new guest posts and content to help our customers understand how Constructor works, how to leverage it to greater effect, and how it intersects with work done by our partners:
- CTO-CTO Podcast with Constructor’s CEO Eli Finkelshteyn
- When Personalization Goes Wrong (And How to Fix It) – Cowritten with Simon Data
- Merchandising in 2020: Managing by Exception
So, what’s new?
Collection interact + click analytics = 💌
Collections let merchants design product experiences for marketing campaigns, site experiences and more with a mix of dynamic rules and individual product uploads. Want to create a page for the men’s ski jackets on sale from three of your top brands?
Collections are your answer.
We’ve launched two new features for collections:
- Collections interact: Preview collections as if you were a user on your site, complete with facets, product data and ranking explanations.
- Collections click tracking: See detailed click data for the last 30 days. See overall views, clicks and click-through rates, as well as how many times every single product was clicked.
Customers are using collections to power millions of browse page views and and tens of millions of revenue — these tools improve the capabilities of this already strong component of the Constructor browse product.
Conversion page updates
With our new Conversion page update, you can now see a detailed rundown of the conversions across your site, along with your conversion rates, conversions vs. sessions, and top converting items.
Collection slotting respects applied filters
Slotting is a powerful tool to spotlight or feature products at the top of search or browse pages. However, when users filter down on results from a specific brand or in a particular price range, it’s important to ensure the returned products match the provided filters.
We applied this logic to all search and browse pages, but certain collection pages didn’t follow this same behavior – this release ensures slotted collections maintain the filtered attributes for a cleaner shopping experience.
An here are some other highlights from Q4:
Click Analytics in Interact for Browse and Collections Pages
We’ve long had the ability to display click and page view analytics for search, but Q4 brought the ability to view these metrics (as well as how our algorithms are affecting results) for both Browse and Collections pages.
Global Searchandizing
Want to optimize search & browse results across the board for specific attributes (like available inventory)? Push own-brand products? Increase exposure for partner brands? Global searchandizing rules make all of this (and much more) possible.
Collections improvements
We recently introduced the ability for merchandisers to create collections based on facet ranges. For example, if a merchandizer wanted to create a “Camping on a Budget” collection, they could select all products in the “Hiking” category and only show products with prices between $10 and $40 (as shown in the image here). In addition, we added the ability to nest expressions: Category is Hiking or Camping AND price is under $20.
Protected facet support
Now, if you’d like to increase or decrease the ranking of your products based on their inventory, margins, or any other metric that you don’t want to expose in a public API response, you can configure facets as protected via the facet config API.
Facet searchandizing
With the expansion of Searchandizing to facet values, you now have all the power of Constructor’s searchandizing functionality for your facet pages — think adding boost, bury or slotting rules to a particular Brand page. And speaking of searchandizing functionality…
Dynamic, time-based searchandizing
Want to promote a specific product launch within search and browse on a set date and time? Boost products that are on sale, but end the boost once the sale ends? Preset some boosts for a new product launch or holiday sale that begins at an inconvenient time? All of this is now possible.
Updated facet configuration
Constructor’s updated facet configuration functionality allows you to easily configure many aspects of your facets, such as their visibility to users, their position within the navigation, and their user-facing display names.
CSV uploads
In the past, slotting products to collections in bulk was time consuming and required extra development work. Constructor’s new CSV Upload functionality changes that. You can now add new products to collections in bulk with simple CSV files.
Other Quality of Life Improvements:
- We’ve halved the first initial page load times in the dashboard.
- We now remember any indexes you had selected and also allow a default index rather than resetting the index on page reload or page changes. We also now remember the previous page users are on when in the dashboard.
- We’ve now added pagination in the conversion dashboard.
As always, our number one focus at Constructor is to drive revenue and conversions for our customers, and we think the updates this past quarter have helped us tremendously in achieving that. We’re excited to see what Q1 of 2021 brings!