Product Recommendations

Product recommendations are a powerful marketing tool you can use to increase conversions, boost revenue, and stimulate shopper engagement. Product recommendations are surfaced on the storefront in the form of units such as “Customers who viewed this product also viewed”. Magento’s product recommendations are powered by Adobe Sensei, which uses artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms to perform a deep analysis of aggregated visitor data. This data, when combined with your Magento catalog, results in highly engaging, relevant, and personalized experiences for the shopper.

You can create, manage, and deploy recommendations across your store views directly from the Magento Admin panel.

For information about installing product recommendations modules, refer to the developer documentation.

Dashboard

On the Admin sidebar, go to Marketing > Promotions > Product Recommendations. The Product Recommendations dashboard appears. From here, you can create a new recommendation or edit an existing recommendation.

This dashboard displays a table of previously configured recommendations (if any) along with the metrics being tracked on those recommendations. You can use the date filter to refine the recommendations by Last 24 hours, Last 7 days, and Last 30 days.

Available recommendation types

Magento provides the following types of recommendations:

• Most viewed - Recommends items most viewed by shoppers within the last seven days
• Most purchased - Recommends items most purchased by shoppers within the last seven days
• Most added to cart - Recommends items most frequently added to carts by shoppers within the last seven days
• Recommended for you - Recommends items based on each shopper’s current and previous on site behavior
• Viewed this, viewed that - Recommends items most often viewed by shoppers who viewed the specified item
• Viewed this, bought that - Recommends items most often purchased by shoppers who viewed the specified item
• Bought this, bought that - Recommends items most often purchased by shoppers who purchased the specified item
• More like this - Recommends items based on similar content and attributes
• Trending - Recommends items based on recent momentum of product’s popularity

Backup recommendations

If there is not sufficient input data to provide all requested recommendation items in a unit, Magento provides backup recommendations to fill those items.

For example, if you deploy the Recommended for you recommendation type to your homepage, a first time shopper on your site will not have generated enough behavioral data to accurately recommended personalized products. In this case, Magento will surface items based on the Most viewed recommendation type to this shopper.

The following recommendation types will fallback to Most viewed if there is not sufficient input data collected:

• Recommended for you

• Viewed this, viewed that

• Viewed this, bought that

• Bought this, bought that

• Trending

Filter recommendations

Magento defines default filters for the Most popular, Trending, and Recommended for you recommendation types. By filtering recommendations, Magento provides more relevant results. For example, if you deploy the Most popular recommendation type to a product detail page, you would not want products from the entire catalog to be displayed, but rather a smaller subset of products relevant to the product being viewed.

Magento filters recommendations based on direct category assignments and their subcategories. For example, if the category of the product is Gear, the recommendation unit displays products that have categories under Gear, such as Gear/Bags or Gear/Fitness Equipment.

The following table describes how the Most popular, Trending, and Recommended for you recommendation types are filtered based on the page.

Filter based on stock status

Product Recommendations use the Display Out-of-Stock Products value configured in the Magento Admin to determine if a particular product should be displayed in a recommendation unit. If the Display Out-of-Stock Products option is set to Yes, products that are out-of-stock are eligible to be displayed in the recommendation unit. If Display Out-of-Stock Products option is set to No, out-of-stock products will not be displayed in recommendation units. You can configure the Display Out-of-Stock Products value in the stock options section of the Catalog configuration.

Product recommendations placement

You can place the recommendations in one of the following page locations.

Some storefront pages restrict where you can place the recommendations. Refer to the table below for more information.

• At the top of main content - Recommendations appear above the main content area just below the top navigation bar.
• At the bottom of main content (default) - Recommendations appear below the main content area and before any other content blocks on the page, like Related Products.

Supported recommendations for each storefront page

The following table lists the storefront pages, where you can place the recommendations, and the recommendation types allowed on that page.

Global category exclusions

You can specify categories that you never want to be included in your recommendations.

1. Click Settings (gear icon) to display the Global Category Exclusions page.

2. For Available categories, enter a category you want to exclude.

   You can select up to 50 categories.

3. Click Save changes when you are finished selecting the categories you want to exclude.