Advanced targeting on Shopify or Shopify Plus

What use-cases can be achieved by using the advanced targeting functionality on Shopify or Shopify Plus?

Lari Lehtonen avatar
Written by Lari Lehtonen
Updated over a week ago

When enabling Category Merchandising for Shopify, Nosto directly modifies collections within Shopify by using the internal API's. This results in collections which are "sorted manually" behind the scenes and served to the front-end as any other Shopify collection.

What is Advanced Targeting, and how does it work?

Advanced targeting unlocks segment targeting and A/B-testing through Nosto. These advanced functionalities require parallel collections to be created within Shopify, and redirects to be applied to the store to match segments or customers assigned to a certain variant for testing to be matched with the appropriate content.

The sequence targeting all customers will still be modified directly within Shopify, and serve as a "default" collection, with additional sequences leveraging Advanced Targeting being managed as individual clone collections.

Where can i see the clone collections that are automatically created?

Clone collections can be seen and interacted with within the Shopify admin interface under Products -> Collections. Nosto clone collections are clearly separated from the general collections by the Nosto logo as the image field.

How are users redirected between different collections?

Nosto handles redirecting of users based on their current segment behind the scenes by using a Javascript redirect. This means if a user clicks on a link to the Clothing collection, they will be redirected to the most appropriate Sequence configured.

Clone collections are always denoted with an automatically generated suffix eg. "clothing-eb7a9a" or "clothing-44488d".

Generated clone collections will always refer to the original clothing collection by using a canonical URL, clearly signalling search engines such as Google or Bing to refer to the original page when crawling.

Learn more about this here: Shopify Sequencing and SEO

What do i need to do before enabling Advanced Targeting?

To ensure Advanced Targeting works as expected when creating clone collections within Shopify, you will need to review the following:

  • 3rd party applications, such as search providers should not automatically list all collections in quicksearch modals etc to prevent duplicate collections to appear.

  • Review how the collection pages are structured, and do the appropriate template modifications for Shopify

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