Any grid, any page
Category listings, landing pages, collection pages, the home grid. The engine is asked to order a set of products and does not need to know what the page is for.
Pages
A campaign sends a thousand people to one page and every one of them sees the same grid. This orders that grid against what each visit implies, from the first page view, with a share of traffic held back so you can tell whether it helped.
The ad
a keyword, a creative, a promise
The click
carries all three in the request
The landing page
discards them and renders the default grid
The shopper
scrolls a grid built before you knew they existed
The ordering rule on most category pages was written once, for nobody in particular, and has not been revisited since.
Where you are
What the campaign knew about this click
1/3of what arrived with the click reaches the grid. The rest is read by your ad platform and then dropped at the door.
Paid traffic lands on a category or a landing page, and that grid is usually the single most expensive surface on the site: you have already spent money to put somebody in front of it. It is also the surface with the least information about them, because they arrived one second ago.
So it gets ordered by a rule written months earlier. Newest first, or bestsellers, or a manual pin from a campaign that ended. The rule is not wrong exactly, it is just the same for a first-time visitor from a price comparison ad and a returning customer browsing on a phone at midnight.
The visit itself carries more than the rule does, and it carries it immediately. Which campaign, which device, what they touched in the first fifteen seconds. None of that needs an identity and all of it is available before the second page view.
The grid you paid to put someone in front of is usually ordered by a rule written before you knew they existed.
What the click already told you
Everything needed to order that grid arrived with the request, before anyone clicked anything.
Products above the fold that match what the ad promised
Illustrative of the shape rather than a measurement of your page. The grid, the layout and the template do not change; only the sequence does.
What it looks like
The same grid ordered by the engine and by your own rule, side by side, per session.
Ordered on arrival, re-ranked as the visit continues.
What happens
Referrer, device and the campaign that sent them are available on the first request, before anybody has clicked anything. That is enough to start from something better than a static rule.
Every view, filter and search inside the visit updates the ordering of what has not been seen yet. The grid is not decided once at page load and then frozen.
The held-back arm renders the page your existing way, stable per session, so the two orderings can be compared on your own traffic rather than in principle.
What you get
Category listings, landing pages, collection pages, the home grid. The engine is asked to order a set of products and does not need to know what the page is for.
The referrer and campaign that delivered the visit are signals like any other, so paid traffic is not starting from nothing the way a profile-based system makes it.
It orders products. It does not template your page, own your components or ask you to move to a new page builder, because ordering is the part that was wrong.
A share of sessions always sees your existing order. That is how any claim about this page, including ours, gets to be checked rather than believed.
Before you commit
Questions
A grid can only be ordered on facts the catalogue records. One category export tells you which ones yours is missing.
Request a Decision AuditNo price is quoted before a pilot, because there is nothing yet to price it against.