Context
Be it on a retail commerce site, or a media publishing site. All websites will have an abundance of content for visitor to see. The issue is that not all visitor will have time to go through all the content that you have created for them, or to look through every single product that your company can offer them. The answer to this issue is with Adobe Target’s Recommendations. With Recommendation you can surface the right content, at the right time, to the right audiences that they would not have known about ! In this demonstration below we will showcase using Adobe Target’s Recommendation by suggesting the visitor to look at some other content based on certain criteria.
Example Use Case: As a Marketing Director , I want my page to recommend to my visitor the most popular Demonstrations that my website has to offer. Also on the same page I want to recommend to my visitor one of the most recently Read articles.
Instructions
Since Recommendation are already on this page, there is no need for any instruction. Firstly below is a list of Demonstration that are most popular on this site.
“Most Viewed Demonstrations”
Secondly , the below is a recommendation on the most recently viewed Demonstration.
“You have not viewed any Demonstrations before, therefore Target could not recommend you to view a recently view Demo”
How it all works
Products/Tools Used:
Adobe Launch
Adobe Target
Adobe Launch
Launch was just used here to load the Target Libraries into the page as well as send to Target the product ID and the product Category ID as well. These were sent to target as “entity.id” and “entity.categoryId”
Adobe Target
There is quite a bit of setup required for this.
Firstly a Feed must be prepared that holds all your products. In the context of Recommendation even pages themselves can be considered products. You can find the sample CSV file used for the feed here.
Secondly, once the feed was setup and indexed into Target. You will need to create a collection for ease of configuration of your Recommendation activity. Since all the Product IDs in our CSV was prefix with “ci”, we created a collection called “Demos Articles” that will contain any product with the Product IDs contain “ci”.
After the Feed and Collections was set up , you will then need to decide on the Criteria and Designs that you want to utilise for your recommendation activity. For the purpose of this activity we used one OOTB Criteria which was the “Recently Viewed Article” and one custom Criteria which was the “Most Viewed Article in this Category”. For each design we tweak the HTML a bit to just print out the header and the thumbnail with a href only.
Before we create the actual Recommendation activity on the page too, we need to ensure that each Demonstration page was sending to Target it’s product ID and Product category, this was done as part of Launch as mentioned above.
Lastly , the Recommendation Activities were created in Target with the above Criteria and Designs.