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Level 3
June 12, 2025
Question

Target recommendation activity

  • June 12, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 2192 views

Hello All,

 

Trying to setting up my first recommendation activity in AT. Completed uploading few products to product catalog via Recommendations API. How can we set up a basic or simple recommendation activity after this catalog set up? Sample use case like if a user searches a particular product , then displaying that product based on the search term. Would be really helpful to get the inputs. Thank you.

1 reply

kandersen-1
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
June 12, 2025

Hi @sankaran ,

Recommendation is one of my favourite features of Adobe Target - just as much as i love it, I hate having to show that it actually works when only a few products has been uploaded. Ideally you implement it on all pages, let it collect behaviour for a week or two and then it will be much easier.

 

It is worth keeping in mind that Recs is driven by the behaviour of the users, so in order for it to show/recommend something it isn't enough to just upload a few products. There needs to be some behaviour in order for a Criteria like 'people who viewed this also viewed that' to work.

In order to track the behaviour you need to implement target requests on the product detail pages that sends in the entity.id parameter - this is what is used to track the behaviour. Creating the products via API is primarily used for enriching the product with meta data if you're not doing this via the target requests on the product detail page.

If you only have the products created via api, these are your options:

1) hardcode a custom criteria to show products (my preferred option). This still requires that entity.id is set on the page where you would like to see it working.

2) if you have Adobe Analytics implemented and the SKU collected in AA is the same as you used when uploading products to Recs you can update the criteria to use Adobe Analytics behaviour data. Again, you still need to ensure you have entity.id set on the page where you would like to see it working.

 

In your specific case where you would like to return something based on a search, you need to set entity.id on the search result. You need to ensure that entity.id has an id of a product that exist in your catalogue, which sometimes can be difficult on a search result page. Typically this is achieved by capturing the SKU of the first product the search is returning.

Let me know how it goes!

 

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SankaranAuthor
Level 3
June 12, 2025

Hi @kandersen-1 Thank you so much for a prompt response and for the detailed insight. We are currently using the web SDK implementation w.r.t target. It's just an initial POC I am doing. Would be really helpful if I can do something setting up a recommendation activity with a simple use case to start with. 

kandersen-1
Community Advisor
Community Advisor
July 16, 2025

Hi @kandersen-1  Yes I am using the Recently Viewed Items criteria . Do you mean that I have to navigate to some other page which contains the same product from the Activity location and then come back to see the recommendations working? Or without navigating, If I just view the product in the page , can I get the recommendation work with any other criteria? 

 

Thank you.


With the recently viewed you need to navigate to other products to have them show.
Change the critieria to Most Viewed across site, that should ensure it should something. 

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