This wizard guides you through uploading your products catalog, setting up product interactions monitoring to assign visitor interest, and designing the look, feel, and placement of your recommendation widgets.
These product recommendations are able to be embedded anywhere on your site, and multiple recommendation widgets can be placed on a single page, each with its own algorithm.
The algorithms included in our solution cover every recommendation need you may have, including cross sales, up-sales, products recently viewed, cheapest product in a category, most popular based on recent interest, etc.
Steps
Product Catalog
Here is where you upload your product catalog (if not already uploaded). Your account only has one catalog, so if you’ve already done this, you don’t need to worry about it.
e-Marketer uses raw data to synchronize with your product catalog/feed, so it doesn’t matter what product management platform you use. All you need is a spreadsheet with your product data, or a live feed such as an RSS feed or a spreadsheet URL.
If your product data changes frequently, you’ll want to use a feed. If it doesn’t, then a single spreadsheet upload will work.
The more data your feed contains, the more rich and dynamic your product recommendations will be. The most essential things to include are:
- Product Title
- Product Listing URL
- Product Image URL
- Price
- Product Description
- Interest Categories for each product (click here to read more about interests)
- Product ID (SKU, or similar unique ID)
Some additional product data that are helpful to have are:
- Sale Price
- Cross-Sale SKUs
- Up-Sale SKUs
- Brand
- Secondary Interest Categories
- Seasonal product associations (sells more in the Summer/Winter)
- Availability (In Stock or not)
You’ll also need to tell e-Marketer which column corresponds to which value, in your e-Marketer product feed.
Product Interaction Event Tracking
How does e-Marketer know what a visitor is interested in? The answer is by tracking product interaction events. This allows e-Marketer to know both what individual visitors are interested in, as well as the general trends among all visitors, or visitors of various demographics, etc.
What is a product interaction event? The most common examples include product views, favoriting or saving, adding to cart, and checking out or purchasing the product.
In order for e-Marketer to track these events, you have to tell it how to know when a visitor is viewing a product, when a visitor is adding to cart, etc.
Note: You only have to do this once, and then the same logic is applied to all of your product pages. You can also request that the e-Marketer team do it for you, as part of onboarding with any package.
If you want to set this up yourself, you can read more about setting up product interaction event tracking here.
Content
This is where you create the actual display widget design which you will use to show the recommendations on your site. The wizard includes templates, which you can then customize to whatever extent is necessary to match your site and branding, using the template editor. All recommendation templates are responsive, by default.
You will also be prompted here to choose the algorithm which makes the most sense for your current application. You can read more about the various product recommendation algorithms here.
This is another aspect of your account setup that can be outsourced to the e-Marketer team. Once you create the recommendation design(s) that look good on your site, they can be used to show any algorithm on any page, with the same design.
Target
If you want your recommendations to only be displayed to a certain targeted audience, you can insert targeting rules here. For instance, you may only want to show “Buy It Again” recommendations to users who have made a purchase, and for this to be invisible to all others.
This portion of the wizard is the same as any other targeting wizard, and you access to the full array of targeting parameters which e-Marketer is capable of, to limit the audience of this recommendation campaign.
QA
QAing your recommendation campaign is much the same as QAing any other type of campaign in e-Marketer. You can click here to read more about the QA process.
Campaign Performance Dashboard
Get a comprehensive campaign performance view, with metrics such as impressions, click through rate, bounce rate, conversion rate, recommendation revenue, time it took to buy from the first click, etc. Filter down to see detailed statistics by recommendation algorithms, list of products or content, and various user data parameters like demographic and location.
*By default, e-Marketer reports campaign performance in real-time to Google Analytics.
