Product recommendations overview

Product recommendations predict and display products your contacts might be interested in buying.

Ometria has seven recommendation engines for use in your campaigns.

Be aware that some recommendation engines are better suited to automation campaigns, and others are better for broadcast campaigns - these differences are described here.

Recommendations can be restricted by product attributes such as category, or filtered by price range.

You can also blocklist certain products or even remove products your contact has already purchased.

Navigation

Go to Campaigns > Product recommendations

The list of your product recommendation instances displays:

Each instance represents a product recommendation which has been created and configured for your account.

The list shows the following:

To help you manage your product recommendations you can archive any not currently in use by selecting Archive from the Edit drop-down.

You can find the archived recommendation again by selecting Show archived from the top right drop-down:

You can select Unarchive at any time to re-activate any of your product recommendations.

Product recommendation criteria

Not all products are available to display in product recommendations.

The following criteria are required for a product to be used in a product recommendation instance:

• Ometria only pulls parent products, not variants (a ‘parent’ product is also known as a ‘top-level’ product, prime product or configurable product in Magento).
• The product must have been sold in the last 28 days.
• We don’t recommend products without any sales, as they are unlikely to convert. The product recommendation engine exceptions to this rule are:
  • Recently added products - this only looks for the newest products
  • Personalised products - in this case, if no sales are found for that set of attributes then the recommendation falls back to products which were most recently added to your site.
• The product must be active with the following details defined at parent level:
  • Title
  • Price
  • URL
• The product must be in stock.
• If a product is out of stock and you don’t want to include it in any recommendations, both the global and store level ‘is_in_stock’ fields in the Product API should be set to ‘False’.
• If you are using a visit to a store as a trigger for your campaign (e.g. contact has placed order in store x), the Store ID must have associated product listings, otherwise Ometria cannot assign the right product to the right store, and no recommendations will display in your email.

See also: Products, product listings and product variants

Out of stock products

For broadcast campaigns, product recommendations generate when your contact opens the email.

The recommendations are calculated on a nightly basis, including whether or not the product is ‘out of stock’.

This means that if a product sells out during the day, e.g. at 2:00pm in the afternoon, and your contact opens their email at 5:00pm, they may still see out of stock products.

Product recommendation rules

Provided that the key criteria listed above are met, Ometria generates product recommendations based on the following rules: