Category Recommendations

Overview

Category recommendations allow you to configure placements that recommend categories instead of individual products. These placements can display default category images or dynamically use product images for a more personalized and visually familiar experience. When a shopper clicks on a recommended category, they are redirected to the category page rather than a product detail page.

By applying personalization, categories can be ordered based on the shopper’s browsing and purchase history. To enhance personalization further, you can configure the placement to display product images instead of default category images, making the recommendations more engaging.

Enabling Category Recommendations

To enable category recommendations, you need to use strategies that support category-level recommendations.

Available strategies

  • Default Strategies

    • CategoryCP2

    • PersonalizedCategories

  • Custom Configurable Strategies

    • You can create a Configurable Strategy and enable the Enable Strategy to Recommend Categories option.

Options for the Configurable Strategy

By default, category recommendations return Primary Categories (leaf-level categories). However, you can modify this behavior to recommend higher-level categories by selecting a Tier 1-5 category level.

For example:

If a recommended product belongs to the following category structure:

Women > Bottoms > Jeans > Relaxed Jeans

  • Primary Category selected → Relaxed Jeans is shown

  • Tier 2 selected → Bottoms is shown

Additionally, you can:

  • Enable the Diversify results by category option to ensure each category appears only once. Diversity will be applied at the category level as configured above.

  • Use the Affinity sorting option to order the recommended categories based on the selected User Affinity Configuration. This allows the system to prioritize categories that align with the shopper’s preferences, leading to more relevant recommendations.

How Categories are Selected

Category recommendations are derived from the products returned by the selected recommendation model.

For example, if the Top Sellers model is selected:

  1. The model retrieves top-selling products
  2. The system extracts the categories of these products
  3. The selected category level (Primary, Tier 1-5) determines which category is displayed

Primary Category Configuration Requirement

For category recommendations to work correctly, each product must belong to only one category, OR the Primary Category configuration must be set. This ensures that the system can accurately determine the correct category for each product. For more information on configuring primary categories, refer to How to Set Primary Categories.

Setting Category Data (Category URL & Default Category Image)

To ensure categories are displayed correctly and link to the appropriate category page, the response includes category details such as the category URL and default category image. These details can be set in one of the following ways:

Catalog Ingestion

  • These details can be included in the Category Full file of the catalog feed.

  • If the category image URL and category URL are present in the feed, they take priority and will be used in the response.

Site Configurations

  • If category URLs and images follow a predictable pattern based on the Category External ID, you can define a URL pattern instead of adding them to the catalog.

  • This is done in Site Configurations using $CATEGORY_EXTERNAL_ID$ as a variable.

    • Example for Category Image URL pattern: www.webstore.com/category_image/$CATEGORY_EXTERNAL_ID$

    • Example for Category URL pattern: www.webstore.com/categories/$CATEGORY_EXTERNAL_ID$

Priority of Category Data

  • If category URLs and images are present in the catalog feed, they will be used.

  • If these details are not in the feed but follow a structured pattern, then the system will use the Site Configurations to generate them dynamically.

Configuring Category Recommendations

Server-side Configuration

No special configuration is needed beyond selecting strategies that recommend categories. You must include the following parameters in the recsForPlacements request so that the response will include the category details:

Copy 
categoryRec=true&categoryData=true

Client-side Configuration

To display category recommendations properly, your layout must include category-specific elements.

  • Use a layout that has the Layout displays category links option enabled. This allows the placement to use category-specific placeholders in the layout definition.
  • If a placement uses a category layout, only strategies that support category recommendations can be applied.