Release Summary - January 2019

The following features were included in the work done during December to be released into the product with the first January release. If you have questions about any of the items on this page, please contact your RichRelevance team.

Advanced Merchandising

The ability to control the de-duplication of products in recommendations on a page has previously been dealt with on a site level, but our clients let us know that there are some instances when they want Advanced Merchandising placements to be controlled separately. Now our Advanced Merchandising users can do this, with the Remove Duplicates setting in AM. When this setting is checked, de-duping takes place on the AM placement regardless of whether or not the site de-duping is enabled. When this setting is unchecked in AM, no de-duping takes place in the AM placement, regardless of whether or not the site de-duping is disabled.

For more information, see How-To: Create Advanced Merchandising Rules

Engage

In order to better support content exploration and the sensitivity of users to how much exploration is done, compared to tested and performing content, we have added the ability to mark the Exploration Level per placement.

Experience Browser

The Experience Browser allows you to view recommendation and content performance right on your site. Improvements in the newest release for Experience Browser include the Placement Report, Placements Sitewide Report, Recommend Logic information, and the Placement Strategies Report.

Placement Report

The Placement Report identifies how the selected placement is performing. It displays the performance of the placement for the last seven days, with totals for all of the placement metrics on the left, and a daily trend on the right. The daily trend defaults to Attributable Sales, but can be changed to show Views, Clicks or Click Through Rate (CTR). This release includes changing the metrics on the left to include totals across all currencies and the addition of a 7-day trend line on the chart.

For more information on the Placement Report, see Experience Browser: Placement

Placements Sitewide

The new Placements Sitewide report offers customers a view on how Recommendation placements are performing across the entire site. It allows you to view the performance based on several different metrics and includes the name of the currently selected placements at the top of the report.

For more information, see Experience Browser: Placements Sitewide.

Placement Strategies

The Placement Strategies Report gives you insight on the performance of available strategies within the placement over the last seven days. The report includes totals for metrics across all currencies in use on the site, with a filter for currency on the Attributable Sales column. The chart now shows Share of Views, Clicks or Sales, depending on which column is selected. This replaces Share of Traffic which was used in a previous iteration of this report.

For more information, see Experience Browser: Placement Strategies.

Recommendation Logic

The Recommendation Logic page shows all of the steps that influence the products being recommended in the result set. In this release, we added the list of strategies considered, ranked in the order given by the Experience Optimizer. Also added are messages for those strategies that were not selected, letting you know why the strategy was not selected. Following the breadcrumbs across the top of the page, you can walk through all of the steps taken to arrive at the final list of recommendations. Those breadcrumbs represent all rules, including system and user rules, and by clicking on the breadcrumb, you can follow each change to the recommendation set.

For more information, see Experience Browser: Recommendation Logic.

Placement Report API

The Placement Report API allows users to embed the insights provided by the Placement Report into any business application. Integrate with other 3rd party tools to get daily data rollups providing information on placement performance site wide. The API provides data for the last seven days, with Currency and Region broken out separately.

For more information about implementing this API, see Placement Report API.