Collections

Last update: March 26, 2025

Topics:
Recommendations

A collection is a set of products or items that are eligible for a recommendation. A collection is defined by specifying the conditions that must be met by items to be part of it.

Commonly, a collection is a set of similar or related items, such as a single product collection. However, you can group whichever items into a category that makes sense to your business, such as products in a certain price range or color or items that are likely to be interesting in a particular geographical area.

Use collections to organize your products in logical buckets. For example, if some items are available in one region but not another, you can create a collection that excludes items that are unavailable in the visitor’s region. You can also use collections to organize seasonal items, or any other organizational parameters that apply to your business.

Backup recommendations generated for each criteria within the recommendation also use this collection, so only items in the collection are included in the backup recommendation. With collections, you can be sure that only products that make sense to show in a location are displayed.

Collections are rebuilt or updated every time each criteria runs.

You can group your items into catalogs, then create separate recommendations for each collection.

Inclusion criteria allow you to do similar things as a collection, but they must be set up every time you create an activity. Collections let you create a set of items one time, then use it whenever it is appropriate to do so without having to set it up again.

When you are creating or editing a Recommendations activity, the collection name appears next to the Criteria label on the activity diagram.

NOTE

Collection rules apply to recommendation items generated after the criteria run. They affect only Entity Recommendations (ERs) in the output, not the key.
Collections are not applied when using the Recently Viewed Items recommendation key.

Create a Collection

Create a collection to organize the products or content you want to show in your recommendations.

Click Recommendations > Collections to display the list of existing collections.

The Collections page displays a list of your existing collections. You create new collections by clicking the Create Collection button. You can also edit, copy, and delete existing collections by clicking the More Actions icon ( ) next to the desired collection and then by clicking the desired option.

The “Number of Items” reported for each collection on the Collections list view is the number of products matching the rules for that collection within the configured default Recommendations host group (environment). See Settings to change the default host group.
Click Create Collection.
Type a Name for the collection.

You can also enter an optional Description.
(Conditional) Choose an environment from the Environment filter while creating (or updating) a collection to preview the contents of the collection in that environment. By default, results from the default host group are displayed.
Set the rules used to build the collection.

For example, your collection might be built around a product ID or category, margin, or any other parameter in the list.

You can add rules to use multiple parameters to define a collection. Multiple rules are joined with an AND operator. All specified rules must be matched for the collection to apply.
Click Create.

Edit, copy, or delete a collection

Click the ( ) next to the desired collection in the list, then click the appropriate icon: Edit, Copy, or Delete.

You can copy an existing collection to create a duplicate collection that you can then modify. This lets you create a similar collection with less effort.

Be aware that collections are available across the entire account. Ensure that you consider this before deleting a collection. Deleted collections cannot be recovered.

Use a collection in a Recommendations activity

Create a collection by using one of the methods mentioned above.
Click Activities and create a new Recommendations activity or edit an existing activity.
After you select a criteria and design, the Options page displays where you select the desired collection.
(Conditional) To change an existing collection setting, on the Experiences page (step 1 of the three-part guided workflow), click a location where you placed recommendations, click Change Collection, then select the desired collection.

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