BlueConic leverages your first-party customer data to deliver personalized recommendations at scale. By tailoring product suggestions based on individual behavior and preferences, you can enhance engagement, drive conversions, and build customer loyalty.
BlueConic offers a range of tools to customize personalized content recommendations. It uses contextual filters and algorithms to tailor recommendations to the current page, offers rotating variants for optimization, prevents repetitive content with exclusion rules, and ensures consistent delivery with fallback options.
Before you begin
Set up a Product Collector Connection to gather the product from your channels that will be used for recommendations.
Make sure you have the Product Recommendations Toolbar Plugin added to your tenant.
Add product recommendations
Content recommendations can be added to your channels in the form of BlueConic Dialogues:
Open the dialogue you want to use for product recommendations.
To add a content recommendations section, edit an interaction and click "Insert object" from the editor toolbar.
Select "Product Recommendations" to add a placeholder to the content editor.
Click and edit or double-click the placeholder to open the Product recommendations pop-up where you can configure the content placement.
Configure your product recommendations
Once you've added a placeholder for your product recommendations, you can configure the following settings:
Select a Product Collector from your tenant, which serves as a source from which recommended items will be chosen.
Click the dropdown menu to choose a template to display your recommendations. You can also choose to edit your own template for recommendations.
(Optional) Set a frequency cap to exclude articles after the user has seen the product a set number of times and not clicked.
Specify the number of displayed recommendations. The default setting is 4 items per set, with one algorithm and filter. Add sets for varied recommendations.
Double-click on a recommendation set to edit its algorithms and filters.
Click Copy to duplicate a recommendation set.
Reorder recommendation sets by dragging and dropping the recommendation bar up or down.
Click Delete to remove a recommendation set.
(Optional) Use fallback algorithms to fill recommendation gaps when defined sets are insufficient. Fallback items, matching your filters and algorithms, populate the remaining slots.
Save your settings.
Define or edit your product recommendation algorithms
To refine the algorithms that choose recommended items:
Click on the algorithm box in a recommendation set to open an edit window.
In the Algorithms tab, you can control which algorithms are used to generate product recommendations.
BlueConic offers recommendation algorithms that are profile-based, aggregate usage stat-based, and content-based. For details on how each algorithm operates, see BlueConic product recommendation algorithms.
In the Filters tab, you can include or exclude products based on its metadata or other settings, like whether or not a user has already seen a product.
When you click the Add filter button, you can construct a new metadata filter tailored to the data your product collector gathers. Out-of-the-box filters include:
Seen products: Products the user has already browsed
Carted: Products the user has already placed in the shopping cart
Bought: Products the user recently bought
Hide out-of-stock products: Products that are in stock
As you make changes, they will be reflected in the content placement in your editor window.
Save your settings.
Next steps
Refine your product recommendation algorithms with A/B testing.
FAQs
I removed an item from my web store. When will it be removed from the product recommendations?
Products are removed from the list of product recommendations when required fields can no longer be scraped in the visitor's browser. This is true even if the visitor views the item -- for example, if the product has been deleted or if the delivery date is no longer available.
I cannot see item X in my personalized recommendations. Why is that?
Product items are added to the recommendations queue when a customer or visitor views the item. Items that have no views from customers or visitors won’t be added to the queue.
Items in the recommendations queue are evaluated and if the required fields become valid, those items are added to the product store.
How does indexing work with personalized product recommendations?
Indexing items may take some time while when the collector is still collecting items Depending on how much traffic your channel has, there might be a short delay indexing items or products when the collector is still actively collecting items.
When will my item be added to the queue to be evaluated for personalization?
Items are added to the queue for the first time when a visitor views a product item. Also, when an item has been clicked on twice, but no view follows the click, the system checks for all required fields and re-evaluates whether to include or delete the item.
Why are out-of-stock or deleted products still appearing in my BlueConic recommendations?
Out-of-stock or deleted products can appear in recommendations if the underlying website data hasn't been updated to reflect their unavailability. Here's how BlueConic handles these situations:
Automatic Removal (404 Errors): Pages and products that return a 404 error (or similar error indicating unavailability) are automatically removed from your product and content stores. These items will no longer be recommended. Similarly, content clicked on three times in recommendations without a resulting view is also automatically removed.
Automatic Removal (Product Collector Limit): When the product collector reaches its limit of 20,000 products, products with the fewest views are automatically removed to make space for new items. This can also lead to the removal of older, potentially out-of-stock items.
Manual Update (Sold Out/Unavailable Messaging): If a product page displays "sold out" or "unavailable" without a 404 error, BlueConic can't automatically detect the status change. In these cases, you can use the
in stockmetatag on your product pages. By updating the value of this metatag from "yes" to "no" when a product goes out of stock, BlueConic can filter out these items from recommendations. This requires either support from our team or assistance from your IT department to set up. This is the recommended approach for handling products that remain on your site but are no longer available.Removal due to lack of views: If a product is clicked on three times in the recommendations, but does not result in a registered view, it is removed from the product store.
How can I view my top recommended items?
To see which content items are recommended most often, use the Top recommended items insight.
How do I add content recommendations to emails?
Using the Open-Time Email Recommendations feature, you can deliver dynamic, individualized content or product recommendations via email based on up-to-the-minute customer data. These recommendations are updated the moment your customers open their email.