To create personalized content recommendations in BlueConic dialogues, you start by collecting a content store, which is a pool of content to be recommended, using the BlueConic Content Collector Connection. This connection collects data about your content and stores it in a BlueConic content store, which feeds personalization in BlueConic.

You can use the content items collected through the connection in BlueConic dialogues to make smarter personalized content recommendations. BlueConic recommendations are powered by algorithms and filters you set in the content editor toolbar.

To create a Content Collector connection, select Connections from the main BlueConic menu and click the Add connection button. Search for 'content collector' and create the connection.

To set up the connection, select "Collect data from your channels" in the lefthand panel.

1. Select the channel(s) to collect content data from.
Optionally, define URL rules to specify which areas of the sites to collect content data from.

2. Manage which data is collected.
Next, paste an article URL into the Test URL field, and click 'Test' to review the metadata that would be collected for your content:

Note: BlueConic supports multiple date formats. Because some browsers interpret date formats differently, using the ISO 8601 date format is recommended. See this documentation for details.

BlueConic requires a number of metadata fields out of the box. Select the checkbox for other metadata fields that are also required.

If required metadata fields are not populated, the webpage may not surface content information in a supported format. The default BlueConic selector will automatically detect:

Providing metadata in one of these standard ways is not only good for the content collector, but it's also good for Google, Facebook, Twitter, and countless other platforms, because it allows these platforms to better understand your content.

Click Default to select an alternative method of retrieving metadata. You can retrieve information from metadata in the HTML, or retrieve it from the HTML using a selector, or using JavaScript.

Click Add data field to add custom metadata fields. For example, if your content has a sponsorship association, or is tagged based on overarching stories or topics, influencers, or sources, you can use this data in recommendation placement filtering.

3. Set the algorithm time frame.
Some recommendation algorithms are based on a look-back time frame (for example, Viral articles or recent high CTR). You can configure that time frame here, based on hours or days:

For details on how each recommendation algorithm operates, see BlueConic recommendation algorithms.

4. Set request headers (optional).
To enable content recommendations to be collected from webpages that are under development or behind a login or paywall, you can add HTTP request headers here. Click "Add request header," choose a channel, and add the custom header name and value used to access the content.

For details on the recommendation algorithms that power personalized content recommendations in BlueConic dialogues, see BlueConic recommendation algorithms.

Changing or updating the selector field for your content collector could result in unwanted data duplication. When collecting articles, the content collector checks the content store for a matching ID. If it finds a matching ID, it will update the existing item in the content store with the new metadata. For this reason, we do not recommend changing the ID selector on your content collector, as this can lead to duplicate items being created in your content store.

In Step 2 of the Collector, you can test to see which values are being returned. Paste a content item's URL into the Test URL field, click 'Test' to review the metadata that would be collected for its content, and then confirm whether all 'Required' metadata fields are returning values.

If values are not being returned for required fields, then items are not being collected successfully.

Content Collectors can only retrieve data that is available via the page source. If data is visible when inspecting the page but not included in the page source, it cannot be collected by the Content Collector. You can review the page source by right-clicking on the web page and selecting View Page Source.

​