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Preview with sort effect annotations

When you preview a sort order, the preview panel annotates each product with the sorting rules that affected its position. These annotations make it easy to understand why products appear where they do and to fine-tune your configuration. Each product can display:
  • Promoted / Demoted badges — color-coded indicators showing which priority rules matched the product and whether they pushed it up (green) or down (red).
  • Soft Boost badges — indicators showing which soft boost expressions matched, labeled with the concrete effect: positions moved (e.g. +3 positions) when the product’s rank changed, or the raw lift value when it didn’t. Movement is signed, so a match that spacing seated lower reads Moved down by spacing, and a match with no movement reads #N (no change). A match that could not be spaced out because the cohort exceeded the spacing budget is labeled Boosted · over spacing capacity and keeps its incoming rank. Hover a product to see a scoring card that breaks down the base value, position change, lift, and final score for each matched boost. Matched boosts appear even when the lift is zero. The card also notes when Layers switched a boost from multiplicative to additive because the base values were too large for the decay.
  • Sequence badges — indicators showing when a product was placed by a product sequence. Hover for the tooltip Grouped by product sequence, which confirms the position came from a curated sequence group rather than a metric or rule.
  • Diversity badges — Diversity ↑ appears when a product was surfaced to broaden diversity coverage (tooltip: Surfaced for coverage). Diversity ↓ appears when a product was pushed down because its family already filled the diversity cap (tooltip: Capped by family limit).
  • Metric values — the actual value used for sorting when a metric or numeric attribute is part of the sort order. Date attributes are shown as human-readable dates, and values from segmented metrics are tagged Segmented (…). Hover to see the metric name.
  • Weighted score breakdown — when a weighted group drove the product’s score, the preview shows a stacked contribution bar and one row per feature. Each row lists the raw value, normalized score, weight share, and contribution (normalized × share = contribution), followed by a Weighted total. Each row’s color dot matches the feature’s slider tint in the editor. Layers normalizes scores against the current result set, so compare contributions within a preview rather than absolute values across sort orders. Features that are gated out or have no value for the product render as — with a 0 contribution.
Each badge includes the position number of the rule in your sort order (e.g., “Promoted by #1”), so you can trace every effect back to its source expression. Products that don’t match a given rule won’t show a badge for it. For step-by-step instructions, see Preview a sort order.

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Preview by region or marketing segment

When a sort order uses segmented metrics or contextual conditions, the preview lets you select a specific region (country, province, city) or marketing segment (channel, source, medium, campaign) to simulate as the visitor context. The collection then reorders as a visitor from that region or segment would see it. To keep previews meaningful, the region and marketing segment pickers only list values that have enough traffic to actually influence sorting. Long-tail values with only a handful of events are hidden. Selecting them wouldn’t change the sort order anyway, because segmented metrics fall back to global values when segment data is too sparse (see Smoothing factor). If a region or segment you expect to see isn’t in the list, it hasn’t yet reached the significance threshold. Wait for more traffic to accumulate, or preview a broader value (for example, the country rather than a specific city).

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See also