Recommendations not showing content

Recommendations are working in Edit mode, but nothing is showing when you launch the recommendation activity. Learn why that is happening.

Description description

Environment

Adobe Target

Issue/Symptoms

You have created a CSV feed with entity.id, entity.name, and entity.message for each item, as well as adding the entity.pageUrl, setting it to the absolute URL of your pages. You’ve also created a design and set the criteria. Then you set up a recommendation activity with a design, criteria, and collection. Everything is displaying as expected in Edit mode, but when you launch it, no recommendations show. When using MboxTrace, you get the following message at the bottom of the output:

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

Resolution resolution

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

Delivery:
Many types of recommendation criteria require a key  on which to base the items to be recommended. For example, in a people who viewed this viewed these criteria, this  is the key. Your page needs to tell, 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, you can return the items to recommend.
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 (this term is used instead of products  to include 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, many users 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.

Ensure that there is entityID on the page.