Create an Adobe Target Recommendations Activity

In this video I’m gonna show you how to create a recommendations activity with an Adobe Target. I’m Mike Mineer, a Partner Training Instructor here at Adobe. By the end of this video you should understand how to create a recommendations activity. To create a recommendations activity you go through the same three-step workflow as you do the other types of activities with an Adobe Target. You start by creating an experience, but that step is a little bit different in that you have to select a location, a page type, a criteria, a design, and then choose some collections and promotions, if you want. And then the last two steps of targeting and goals and settings are the same as the other activities within Adobe Target.

Let’s go in and go through the workflow and see the process of setting up the recommendations activity.

So to get to create an activity I just go to the activities tab within Target, I click on Create Activity and I come down to the bottom that says Recommendations. If you don’t see the recommendations option available it means you’re not in an account that is Target Premium. Recommendations is only available in Target Premium.

I go ahead and click on the link of Recommendations, and it pulls up this window which is the same window as you see with other activities.

For this example, we’re going to go ahead and use Web. We’ll use the visual experience composer, and then we’ll choose a URL of a winter ski coat to use.

I’ll go ahead and click Next.

Once Target loads my site I now need to choose where I want my recommendation to show up. As is the case with other activity types, I can come in and I can start clicking to decide where do I want to put this exactly. And as I click it gives me my popup box of options. Notice these options are different than other activities because these are specific to recommendations. I have three choices, replace with recommendations, insert a recommendation before or insert a recommendation after. For our example I’m gonna insert a recommendation after. Now it has me choose or select a page type. This is important because this page type is going to give you a unique set of criteria that are specific to this type of page.

Now that I pull it up, you’ll see that there are four available products. Now I’ve got the page site up here. I said it was a Cart Page. If I made a mistake I can come up and change it and say, oh, this is actually a Product Page, and I can add that. And if I want I can come and exclude Cart Page. And then it’ll show me the types of criteria that I have available to me on a product page. I then need to choose which criteria do I want this activity to use. I can create a new criteria, and the process of creating criteria is covered in another video. I’m gonna go ahead and choose two criteria, and by so doing it makes it so I’ll only be able to choose one design. If I only chose one criteria here, I’d be able to choose multiple designs on the next page. But for this example I’ve chosen to do multiple criteria. I go ahead and click Next. And then I have to come in and choose which design do I want? There are some default designs, and you can also create custom designs, which is also covered in another video. I’m gonna choose this six by one product layout and go ahead and click Next.

Now the options I have here are I can choose a collection to choose a specific set of products or category of products that I want to be in this recommendation.

If I go ahead and click on the search icon it’ll pull up all of the collections that I have. I can minimize it to a small group or I can make it be all collections or all products. Front and back promotions are a way that you can insert products at the beginning or the end of your recommendation that don’t match the criteria that you’re just trying to promote to users. That is covered in another video.

Go ahead and click Save.

And it now brings me to see my activity. I’m gonna quickly give it a name.

I’ll just call it a Recs Activity.

And I go ahead and click Next. Now this process is the same as any other activity where I can choose an audience. I can choose any audience I want by clicking on the three dots. Click Replace Audience. And I can either create a new audience or choose one of the existing audiences that I already have.

I’m gonna go ahead and stick with All Visitors in this example. And then I can come in and decide how much traffic do I want to see the recommendation compared to how much do I want to see no recommendation? Notice it doesn’t allow me to change each individual criteria, only this number of no recommendations. But as I change that it will automatically change the other two options of criteria to be exactly half of the remaining traffic available.

I then click Next, and in my goals and settings I come through and I choose what do I want to put here? I can choose a priority and make it a higher priority in case there’s a collision. I can choose a start date and an end date. I can also choose my reporting source. It can either be analytics or target. And in this instance we’re going to use target. And then I say, what’s my primary goal? The metrics available in the primary goal are exactly the same as other target activities with one exception. If I come in here to conversion, it gives me this option of clicked on a recommendation. That means that somebody clicked on one of the recommendations that shows up in my activity. All the others that are available are the same as the others. And if you need to learn more about the goal metrics and how to set those up, there’s another video that covers that.

We’ll go ahead and leave this one as clicked on a recommendation. I can add additional metrics, however many I need. And then I can also come down and choose Audiences for Reporting.

I go ahead and click save and close, and I have now successfully set up my recommendations activity.

So now you should understand how to create a recommendations activity.