Primary Categories

Overview

Recommend allows Digital Optimization managers to dynamically filter product recommendations by either siloing the recommendations within the same category as the seed or by applying category diversity. Category siloing is used to display similar products, while category diversity automates cross-sell recommendations, ensuring that the suggested products are not from the same category as the initial product, thus minimizing the redundancy of similar products in the recommendations.

Primary Category Designation

When products belong to multiple categories, designating a primary category can assist in applying the category silo and diversity filters.

Note: If a category hint is provided in the instrumentation, it will take precedence over the primary category for applying the category silo filter.

For example, consider a pair of jeans that belongs to the following categories:

  • Fashion > Women’s Fashion > Clothing > Jeans > Skinny Jeans

  • Fashion > Spring Collection ‘22 > Women’s Clothing

For the purposes of category diversity filtering, we want to use the "Skinny Jeans" category as the primary category. This way, if the recommendation model contains multiple products from the Blouses, Blazers, Sweaters, Skinny Jeans and Boots categories, then after category diversity is applied, we are only left with one product from each of the categories, except for Skinny Jeans.

We do not want the second category to be used as a primary category since it belongs to the Spring Collection '22 node, which we consider to be a marketing category.

Setting the Primary Category Configuration

Digital Optimization managers can configure the Primary Categories on the Omnichannel Personalization Cloud portal. When the product catalog is updated, a process runs to assign the primary category for each product in the catalog, starting from the Primary Category nodes and traversing the category taxonomy down to the lowest level category. The categories configured as Non-Primary Category Nodes will be skipped during this process.

Configuration Guidelines

Your configuration of Primary and Non-Primary Category nodes will depend on your unique category taxonomy. Generally, categories should be set as high as possible in the taxonomy. That is, it's best practice to select high-level categories as your Primary Category Nodes, and then to add Non-Primary Category Nodes for those categories you want to exclude within those nodes. For performance reasons, you do not want to select a long list of low-level categories as the Primary Category Nodes.

Take the following taxonomy as an example. We would configure the categories as follows:

  • Primary Category Nodes: Fashion

  • Non-Primary Category Nodes: Spring Collection ‘22

Referring back to the example of the pair of jeans above, again, this product belongs to the following 2 categories, and we want Skinny Jeans to be the primary category:

  • Fashion > Women’s Fashion > Clothing > Jeans > Skinny Jeans

  • Fashion > Spring Collection ‘22 > Women’s Clothing

Based on these configurations, Skinny Jeans would be assigned as the primary category for this product. That's because the second category (Fashion > Spring Collection ‘22 > Women’s Clothing) is skipped since it is within the Spring Collection '22 node, which is configured as a Non-Primary Category Node. We are left with Skinny Jeans, which is the lowest level category within the Fashion node (Fashion > Women’s Fashion > Clothing > Jeans > Skinny Jeans).

Handling Multiple Levels within the same Category node

Consider the same product is associated with a third category:

  • Fashion > Women’s Fashion > Clothing > Jeans > Skinny Jeans

  • Fashion > Women’s Fashion > Clothing > Jeans

  • Fashion > Spring Collection ‘22 > Women’s Clothing

For the purposes of category diversity, we want Jeans to be the primary category. By default, the process will select the lowest level category, so we need to adjust the configuration:

  • Primary Category Nodes: Fashion

  • Non-Primary Category Nodes: Spring Collection ‘22, Skinny Jeans

With this configuration, the primary category for the example product will be Jeans.

Note: This is only possible if the product is directly associated with the category that you want to use as the primary category. In the original example, where the product was only associated with two categories (Skinny Jeans, Women’s Clothing), it would not have been possible to set Jeans as the primary category.

By following these guidelines, you can ensure effective category diversity in your recommendations, enhancing cross-sell opportunities and improving the relevance of suggested products. You can apply category diversity to any Configurable Strategy.