Before we talk about boosting, remember that LiftIgniter's algorithms are dedicated to surfacing the right piece of content for each user - the ones which we are most confident (mathematically speaking) will be clicked on next. That said, sometimes business or editorial rules require that a particular piece of content be highlighted across your customer base, and we definitely have ways to do that.


Why is the item being boosted?

The right method for boosting often depends on the reason it is being marked as important. Are you looking to:

  • Highlight more recently published content?
  • Get more visibility for a particular category of items (a new product line, a new article series, etc)?
  • Show particularly high-revenue pages or items more often?


Boosting Methods

1. Boost Individual Items

This provides a pre-set, flat boost to particular items that have been flagged via their inventory metadata. Implementing this simply requires adding the following to the LiftIgniter JSON object:

"value" : "high"


2. Favor recently published items

The simplest method is to set a maximum age for recommendable items. If an item is older than the specified time it won't be allowed in the recommendations.


A more advanced variation is a boost that decays over time. We start with a relatively large boost for items as soon as they are published, and that boost gradually decreases as the item ages. After the specified amount of time, no boosting is applied and our natural algorithm weighting takes over.


3. Favor high-revenue items

Note: This generally requires that you send your inventory to us via our API, as using Javascript would require exposing the page's value to you within the page's DOM for us to scrape.


Our models can take into account the monetary value of a page, and optimize for a mix of CTR and conversion. By including the value of the page in each item's metadata, we can tweak your account's algorithms to include that new factor into their calculations as a goal. If you'd like to implement this, please contact Support!


4. Other Custom Rules

If you'd like to have your content boosted in a particular way, we can create custom rules for your account to meet your goals. Contact us and we'll be happy to get this started for you!