Create a Feed in Adobe Target Recommendations

Transcript

In this video, we’re gonna talk about creating a feed within Adobe Target Recommendations. I’m Mike Mineer, a Partner Training Instructor here, at Adobe.

By the end of this video, you should be able to set up a feed and know which type of feed to use. The benefits of using a feed, is that you can upload product information to Recommendations, you can schedule how often to upload new information and also, you can use several different ways to upload that information. When you create a feed, there’s a simple three step process to follow. First, you choose a source, then you schedule the frequency, and then you map to environment.

Go ahead and follow along with me as I show you the three different types of feeds that you can set up.

When you come into Target to create a feed, the first thing you need to do is click on Recommendations on the top and then Feeds on the left hand side and that will take you to this page that I’m currently on. Then you will wanna click on Create Feed in the blue box here.

That will pop up this screen and give us our three different options. The first thing we wanna do is name our feed.

And we’re just gonna call this “Creating a Feed”.

The next thing we wanna do, is select the source of the feed we wanna do. As mentioned, there’s three different sources that we can use. The first one is the Adobe proprietary CSV.

This allows you to customize your upload, using Adobe’s proprietary CSV format. The file contains display information about the reserved and custom attributes for your products. To upload attributes specific to your implementation, you simply replace the custom number and the header row with the name of the attribute you want to use. And just to show you, here’s an example of a feed that you could upload, where you simply change these custom attributes that you can see listed here. And then you also have the default attributes that are available for you to use.

The next step is to choose a location. And I have this file located at this URL. So I simply paste that in there, click Next and then it’s gonna have me choose a schedule. How frequently do I want this file to update. And this all depends on company need, if you’re making a lot of changes on a daily basis to your files, and to the various aspects, the margins, or the inventory, whatever it may be, you’ll probably wanna do it daily. But you’ve got the four different options, whatever works best for you. And then notice, it chooses a time when it’s going to daily update, and it is listed there. After we choose our schedule, we wanna click on Next and choose our mapping. Now since this is using Adobe’s CSV format, we don’t have to do any mapping of column headers to the values within Recommendation. That’s all automatically done. So the only thing I need to do, is choose which environment I wanna map it to. It can be all host groups, or I can do one in particular.

And then I go ahead and click Save.

And I now will have that new feed ready to go.

Let’s go ahead now and take a look at the other two options we have available to us. We’ll go ahead and click Create Feed again, give it a name.

And this time, we’re going to choose Google Product Feed. Just like as is the case with the CSV file, we need to choose a specific URL. Now if you have an existing Google Product Feed, then you can use that as your import file. But keep in mind that it is not required to use actual Google data. Recommendations simply uses the same format as Google, you can use this method to upload any data you have and use the available scheduling feature. However, the key here is that you retain Google’s predefined attribute names when you set up the file.

We’re gonna go ahead and put in the URL, go ahead and click Next, just like is with the cases, the CSV file, we needed to schedule it. Once we do that, then it’s gonna come down here and have us map the Google values on the left to the Recommendation values on the right. So I’m gonna find ID and I’m mapping the Google ID to the Recommendations ID.

I can come in, add another value, see if we can find brand right there. And I will also have a brand over here and you would just need to go through the process of setting up and mapping all of the columns that you have. And then just like the other option, we also have the different host groups of which environment we want this data to be available to.

The last option we have available to us is the Analytics Classifications. The Analytics Classification looks directly at Adobe Analytics, this is not the preferred method to use, so keep that in mind. And there’s a couple of things to be aware of, first of all updates to the entity attributes, incur an additional delay of up to 24 hours, it’s not going to be as real time as Target. And Target supports the product classification only. And the Analytics products queue must map to the same level as the Recommendations entity ID. That’s how everything works together is through the Analytics products queue, and the Recommendations entity ID. But if we choose Analytic Classification option, it then has us choose a Report Suite from within in Analytics.

And once I choose that, it gives me the option to go ahead and click Next.

Just like the other two, I choose the frequency which I wanted. And then I come in here and I map the values. I can map the Key to the ID and then choose the advanced settings of which environment I want it to map to.

You should now be able to set up a feed and know which type of feed to use.