Premium

Recommendations Classic versus Recommendations activities in Target Premium

Last update: March 15, 2023

Information to help you choose between Recommendations Classic and Recommendations activities in Target Premium.

NOTE
Recommendations activities are available as part of the Target Premium solution. They are not available in Target Standard without a Target Premium license.

In the classic Recommendations product, recommendations were displayed by creating a data collection mbox on a page, then adding a display mbox in a specific page location. The Recommendations activity in Target Premium allows you to collect visitor information and create your recommendations anywhere on the page without the need to create an mbox for each location where you want to recommend products or content. A simple JavaScript reference in the header of the page enables recommendations anywhere on the page. Use this JavaScript reference to pass keys to the global Target mbox, such as the entity.id and entity.categoryId keys.

Recommendations Classic appears as its own card in the Experience Cloud UI. A Recommendations activity is available from within the Target Premium workflow.

Recommendations Classic users can continue to use their Recommendations mboxes in Target Recommendations. They can also combine the classic and Target approaches by keeping their mboxes and using the JavaScript code in the header to activate Recommendations functionality for the other elements on the page. To gain full Target functionality, however, Recommendations Classic users might prefer to delete their old mbox and rely solely on Target Recommendations.

The Recommendations activity in Target improves on Recommendations Classic in the following main areas:

Recommendations as an offer

You can include recommendations inside A/B Test (including Auto-Allocate and Auto-Target) and Experience Targeting (XT) activities.

This functionality opens up entirely new capabilities, such as:

  • Test and target recommendations and non-recommendations content within the same activity.
  • Easily experiment with placement of recommendations on the page, including the order of multiple recommendations.
  • Automatically push traffic to the best-performing recommendations experience using Auto-Allocate.
  • Dynamically assign visitors to tailored recommendations experiences based on their profile using Auto-Target.

To get started, create an A/B Test or Experience Targeting activity using the Visual Experience Composer and use the Insert Before, Insert After, or Replace With action to add recommendations to an experience.

For more information, see Recommendations as an offer.

Criteria

Target Recommendations includes a criteria library containing prepackaged sets of rules and configurations. In Recommendations Classic, each recommendation was built manually by filling out a form and choosing from the large list of rules. Now, when creating a Recommendations activity, you simply choose a pre-configured criteria set. You can still create custom recommendations, but the criteria library contains many of the most common configurations, pre-built to simplify the process, and using language that people understand. These prepackaged criteria can be used as is, or they can be copied and edited to fit your specific needs.

overview_criteria image

Criteria are pre-configured and sorted by industry verticals, page types, and implementation. For example, you can look for the criteria that apply to the retail vertical, for use on a product page, showing products from within a particular category (as defined by the entity.categoryID parameter).

For more information about using and creating criteria, see Criteria.