Hello,
This has been a difficult one to unravel, it's not resolved yet, but we think we have a general idea of what's happening. So mostly I'm posting to ask if others have experienced the same situation and raise awareness to the issue if not.
Background:
- Two of the Adobe solutions we use are Analytics and Target.
- We send our full assortment of Product Classification data via a file to Analytics every day for SAINT classification
- In Target we use Recommendations, and it has been very successful for us over the past six years.
- We set up a Classifications Feed six years ago so that we knew we'd have the same set of data between solutions and only needed to use one ETL job on our end -- we know that it takes an extra day to get to Target Recs, but that's okay by us
A few months ago, we noticed that our recommendation zones were missing products. As we dug in, it became apparent this was widespread. Due to a known issue in Target however, the Catalog still showed all of our products (IRI-857 -- and quick side note, the fact that this isn't made known in the UI is a frustrating and huge miss on Adobe's part, that's one of the primary use cases for Target).
- After working with Target support, they eventually came to the conclusion that the items were not being included in the Classification feed from Analytics
We confirmed that all products were being ingested into Analytics, we received confirmation emails, and the classified data was available in the solution itself (more data than was being passed from the page).
- After working with Analytics support, we were made aware of a change that the Analytics team made, switching from SAINT to Taxonomist tables primarily for ingestion speed improvements. This update was made to our environment in January of this year.
- I can't find any documentation about this change, I went through all the release notes and it doesn't appear to be listed (I'm good at missing things though so it might be in there somewhere). Support told us that it wasn't supposed to have any outward impact. He pulled up the tables and showed us that our product data was being ingested
- We couldn't find these tables in the Analytics UI
- Despite them being in Analytics, I did a full export of the SAINT tables and showed support that they were largely empty (7000 items when it should have been over 350k). This appears to be what is being sent over to Target for Recommendations -- but no one that we've interacted with can answer confidently.
- Engineering agreed that the data wasn't copying over, and said they corrected it. However, it has not been corrected. At least not the reporting server where we can download from and what is being sent to Recommendations.
We know we can hit Target Recommendations directly to maintain a product catalog, but we intentionally chose this other offered path to minimize the effort on our end. At this point, it seems like something we'll need to take on.
So, Adobe Analytics community. Have you experienced the same thing? Is there any documentation about the Taxonomist table update to the SAINT process that I missed? Any suggestions on ways forward instead of going point to point to both Analytics and Target separately?
Thank you for your help!
Robbie
