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Product and content recommendations can help your customers discover items or content they are likely to find relevant based on their previous behavior or preferences. These recommendations are a great tool for offering tailored products or content that can enhance user experience and drive engagement.

You may want to render these recommendations yourself, especially if you have a UI component that dynamically displays recommended products based on supplied product IDs, giving you greater control over how and when these suggestions appear. The Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue can facilitate this by allowing you to define recommendation settings, ensuring the suggestions align with your specific needs and preferences while maintaining control over the web experience.

Installing the Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue

By default, the Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue is not installed in BlueConic. To install it, navigate to BlueConic Settings > Plugins, click the Add plugin button, and register the following external URL:

https://plugins.blueconic.net/dialogue_recommendations/index.xml 

For more detailed instructions, see What are BlueConic plugins? And if you need further assistance, contact BlueConic Support.

Configuring the Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue

Once the plugin has been installed, you can create a new Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue by navigating to Dialogues, clicking the Add dialogue button, and searching for the name.

1. Enter a name for your Dialogue.
2. Similar to all BlueConic Dialogues, you can configure the following tabs:
   1. Who: This is left as All visitors, but can be further refined by adding conditions.
   2. When: This is left as-is, but can be further refined by adding timing and priority rules.
   3. Where: This is left as All channels, but can be further refined here.
   4. What: This is where the most configuration happens.
      • First, choose the Product or Content Collector from the dropdown that stores the product or content information used to generate your recommendations.
      • You will see that, by default, the rules are configured to show four recommended items based on a “items viewed most often” algorithm. This can be altered by clicking into the rule.
        
   5. Why: This is left as-is.
3. Save your settings and switch the dialogue to On.

Using the Recommendations Offered as an Event Dialogue

Once the dialogue has been configured, you can begin to consume the data in one of two ways:

1. By registering an Event Listener to the web event.
   Note: Make sure the Event Listener is added before the BlueConic event is triggered.
   
2. By subscribing to the BlueConic event using the BlueConic frontend API.
   Make sure to wait for the BlueConic client to be available. It doesn’t matter if the subscribe event occurs before or after the event is thrown. In both cases, the handler will be triggered.
   

Note: It is up to the website what to do with the data (for example, render the recommendations in a carousel). Also, the website is responsible for registering clicks using the BlueConic API. Since the rendering is happening outside of the scope of BlueConic, the platform doesn’t know when a click happens.