Recommendations not showing content

Description description

Environment
Adobe Target

Issue - Steps to reproduce

  1. Create a CSV feed and have a entity.id, entity.name, entity.message for each item along with adding my entity.pageUrl (setting this to the absolute URL of example pages).
  2. Create a Design and set the Criteria.
  3. Create a Recommendation activity and set it up with a Design, Criteria, and Collection.

Expected result:
Everything displays as expected in Edit mode, and when it is launched, recommendations show properly.

Actual result:
​​​​​​​Everything displays as expected in Edit mode, and when it is launched, no recommendations show.
Using mboxTrace, the following error message appears at the bottom of the output:

"response" : {
"node" : "re1.prod26",
"status" : {
"code" : "NO_CONTENT",
"details" : ""
}

Resolution resolution

Solution
It’s helpful to think about this in terms of “recommendation delivery” and “entity ingestion”:

Delivery:

Many types of recommendation criteria require a “key” off which to base the items to be recommended.

For example in a “people who viewed this viewed these” criterion, “this” is the key. Your page needs to tell us, in the mbox request, the key. In this example, the key is the item being viewed, specifically it is the unique identifier for that item, the entity.id.

Once Target knows what the visitor is viewing, we can return the items to recommend.

Please note that not all criteria are key-based. For example “Recently Viewed” and “Top Sellers” do not require a key, and thus will work fine without passing entity.id.

Ingestion:

Entities (we use this term instead of “products” because we can recommend other things like articles, videos, etc.) can be ingested into Target via feeds, mbox calls, api calls, or any combination of these.

The entity.id is an identifier that uniquely identifies the entity, so in this case it is likely your productID.

Mbox calls are primarily used for delivery, however a lot of customers find it convenient to pass in the full set of entity attributes on their mbox calls.

However, if you pass in your full product catalog via feeds, you only need to pass a key in your mbox request, and then only if you are using a key-based criterion.

Please ensure that there is entityID on the page.

recommendation-more-help
3d58f420-19b5-47a0-a122-5c9dab55ec7f