How is Product Spotlighting different from Content Items?

Both content item and spotlights are customize-able pieces of the page that can be added to either search results page or landing pages.

Content ItemSpotlight
One of the three:
1. Image
2. Custom HTML
3. Predefined widget
What does it hold?A set of products defined in its rule
1. To display a banner image when user searches for a particular keyword or selects a facet etc.
2. To display custom HTML upon keyword search or facet selection
When to use it? Examples?1. When there are no products available for a keyword
2. Related search term’s results need to be displayed. E.g., when user searches for jacket and you want to display some specific set of products which have a limited sale offer.

Some import points to note:

Both Spotlights and Content Items are displayed when associated with a Campaign trigger.

Spotlight can be considered as a special type of Content Item when associating with a trigger.

We can associate a spotlight or content item while creating a trigger; we can also associate a trigger while creating a spotlight or content item.

Example - No Results page:

As a standard example, when there are no search results, we can:

Create a content item to display a banner image

Create a content item to display a custom HTML message with links to similar pages

Create a Spotlight to show our chosen products

Put together, these three can provide more information than simply displaying a message such as “there were no results”.