Hi there, thanks for your question!

Yes, there are several ways of forcing a product to be displayed as a recommendation despite your site not getting a lot of traffic:

1. Promotions

2. Criteria Sequencing with two criteria: (1) Custom Criteria and (2) Popularity, Most Viewed

3. Single Custom Criteria that combines or blends products into the results of Popularity, Most Viewed. This can be done by downloading a CSV for an activity that uses Popularity, Most Viewed.

4. Attribute weighing (setting a customer entity.attribute such as  `entity.boost = true`) and then setting up a rule in the Criteria to boost higher when `entity.boost=true` (edited)

Hope this is helpful!