Manual Recommendations

Manual recommendations can offer powerful abilities to specifically target recommendations to a specific product or category for particular use cases.

When using manual merchandising rules, be cautious that you don't configure rules that constrain recommendations so much that the customer sees only a very limited set of recommendations.

How It Works

Manual recommendations are used in specific use cases to increase the frequency of a product or category of products being included in the recommendations set. You can optionally choose to have the recommendation engine backfill the rest of the available slots with most relevant products. If you decide to backfill, ensure to use an appropriate strategy message. Alternatively, you can let the system use the strategy message configured for the strategy that was used to backfill. Returned recommendations will respect other enabled merchandising rules; if a blacklisted product is defined, the blacklisting will be respected, and the product will not be displayed.

You can also select the placement(s) on each page type where you want the manual recommendations to be shown. This takes priority over any strategies you have preferred on that placement. If you don't select a placement, then it is placed on the first placement on the page that doesn't have preferred strategies assigned to it. (For more information on how these rules work together, see Merchandising Rules.) Contact your Client Solutions Engineer to ensure that your manual recommendations appear within the recommendation placement you desire.

Note: Manual recommendations do not apply to Advanced Merchandising results, and are seen as secondary in order to Advanced Merchandising. This means if an Advanced Merchandising rule and a Manual rule are in place for the same context, Advanced Merchandising will win out, and the manual rule will not be reflected.

Sample Use Cases

You can:

• Spark the cross-sell of products from diverse categories that are not intuitively matched (for example, laptops and small refrigerators during back-to-school season)
• Encourage the recommendation of complementary, not just substitutable, items to promote multiple-item transactions
• Promote 3-year warranties on item pages across all LED televisions

Manual Recommendations Page

To access the Manual Recommendations page, On the Omnichannel Personalization dashboard, go to Recommendations > Manual Recommendations . The Manual Recommendations page is displayed with the rules already created

The Manual Recommendations page displays all the existing rules with the following details:

• Rule Name: Name given to the rule by the author.

• Targets: The context of the rule, where on the site should the rule be seen.

• Placements: Which placements were chosen for the rule.

• Merchandised Products: The product IDs of the products to manually recommend.

• Production & QA/Integration: Whether or not the rule is enabled in those environments.

• Start/End Date: The given start date and end date (if any)

To edit any existing rule, click on the rule name.

Reporting

Manual recommendations are reported on in strategy reporting as the following:

• ManualRecommendationFloating: This shows the views for all recommendations driven by manual rules. It also represents manual recommendations that are assigned to more than one placement.

• ManualRecommendationFixed: This shows the manual recommendation in a specific placement.

When these show up in strategy reporting, whether that be site analytics, strategy reporting, or experience browser, it means the views and clicks are coming from a manual recommendation. It also means it is coming from a backfill used by the manual recommendation as well.

Instructions

For step-by-step instructions to create a new merchandising rule, see Create Manual Recommendation Rules

Tips and Hints

• Manual recommendations override other recommendation sets from the Algonomy engine. To understand how different rules work together, see Merchandising Rules.
• If you know the IDs of the products you want to use, you can paste them (comma separated) into the text box and click Add. If you don't know the IDs of the products, you can start typing the name of the product. The system suggests the matching products from our catalog. Results that start with "N/A" are the products that we can't recommend on the website because they are marked as "non recommendable" in our catalog. For content, you can either use known IDs or type the name of the content.
• You can click on the green UP/DOWN arrows, to order how the products should be displayed to the customer.
• If you only have specified one or two products, you can choose to have Algonomy strategies backfill the placement with additional products. The King of the Hill system will choose the most relevant strategy for the current page. The products recommended by that strategy are appended to the manually recommended products.
• If you're using manual recommendations with Discover, certain restrictions apply. See Sorting with Merchandising Rules in Discover: Sorting, Promoting and Boosting Guide.
• We recommend that you specify a custom message to help the customer know what is being recommended to them.

Notes:
• Because manual recommendations override relevant recommendation sets from the Algonomy engine, the retailer should be confident in the configured product associations; otherwise, this will unnecessarily expose the merchant to potential revenue loss.
• Manual recommendations based off a seed product are not recursive. Meaning, the specified manual recommendations only display when the target product is the seed--not the associated products.