Intro
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Nosto does not require historic order or user data to personalize the user experience. Contextual data, behavioural data, Nosto AI based profile enrichment and fresh transactional event data have shown to increase relevance over historic data. Please note that Nosto ships with advanced cold start algorithms that warm up the algorithm without additional input.
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By integrating your CDP with Nosto, you can turn unified customer insights into dynamic onsite experiences - personalizing search, merchandising, and content for every shopper in real time.
Because the CDP often aggregates first-party data (across multiple sources) and segments it, you can onboard these segments into Nosto to power 1:1 personalization across channels (web, mobile, email) in real time. Supported examples include:
Changing the homepage hero banner reflecting the historic brand affinity of the user, as stored in the CDP
Identifying a VIP customer and welcome them back with an in-line banner, even if you are just deploying Nosto
Immediately showing product recommendations featuring the users preferred brand, category affinities and price points, even if you are just deploying Nosto
Immediately re-ranking categories featuring the users preferred brand, category affinities and price points, even if you are just deploying Nosto
Using offline transactional data (ie. retail store transactions) to personalize the onsite experience
And Only with Nosto: Getting deep merchandising and preferences insights into audiences stored in your CDP and imported to Nosto
Generally speaking to set this up, you first define which customer attributes and segments from the CDP you want to activate (e.g. lifecycle stage, high-value customers, churn risk, product affinities). Then you configure an API connection from the CDP to Nosto that sends those profiles and segments on a shared identifier (such as customer ID or hashed email), and map these fields inside Nosto so they’re available for targeting and personalization. Once the sync is live, Nosto uses these segments to drive tailored recommendations, search results, banners, and experiments, while you pass back audience attributes from Nosto into the CDP to continuously enrich profiles and improve your audience models over time.
Similarly, historic order data imports and offline transaction event streams can be leveraged to great effect.
Supported Use Cases
User Attribute / Segmentation Export
User Attribute or Segment export is likely most useful when the target use case is to use Nosto segment data in a 3rd party system such as in CDP, ESP, CRM or similar as it supports full periodical data export of all shopper identities and emails that Nosto processes.
User Attribute / Segmentation Import
Nosto supports importing customer data from a 3rd party system such as your CDP, CRM, Email Service Provider or Data Management Platform. This is useful for example when you re-platform from another system and want to create segments in Nosto by using existing customer data that you have previously used elsewhere. Alternatively, you can also continuously synchronise customer data from a 3rd party system to Nosto.
User Attribute / Segmentation Analytics Enrichment
Do you want to get a deeper understanding of your audiences that are stored in a CDP? By importing audiences to Nosto, the system will enrich the data with numerous insights such as product, brands & category preferences, lifecycle reports and more. Example: The reporting view would surface such details for your imported VIP shoppers and this can help you craft your marketing message for loyalty campaigns and re-targeting.
Using Historic User Order Data for Personalization Engine Warm-Up
While Nosto does not need past order data to perform at its peak and behavioral real-time user data in most cases outperforms historic data, brands with a large historic user base with a valuable 360 view of the users might want to leverage said data for personalization from day one.
What is needed:
Send historic transaction data to Nosto using GraphQL (
placeOrder(by:BY_REF, id: "e18daf14-d715-4d77-82f2-93eceb4ae1ef", …)) and an unique, system-wide identifier such as customer ID. (“customer reference” in Nosto terms)To leverage data from day one Nosto needs to match this customer reference in the frontend via the “customer reference” page tagging/tagging provider. This requires a small change in your frontend:
If a user is logged in, your theme/frontend must pass your “customer reference” to Nosto: https://docs.nosto.com/techdocs/implementing-nosto/implement-on-your-website/manual-implementation/adding-the-customer-information
If a user is not logged in but a "customer ID" cookie is available (which you’re using as “customer reference”), you must pass it to Nosto in the same way.
An approach could be to read the customer ID from the session and render the following HTML on the server side:
<div class="nosto_customer" style="display:none" translate="no">
<span class="customer_reference">e18daf14-d715-4d77-82f2-93eceb4ae1ef</span>
</div>
Alternative approach: read the customer ID from a cookie and execute the following JavaScript:
nostojs(api => {
api.setTaggingProvider("customer", {
customer_reference: "e18daf14-d715-4d77-82f2-93eceb4ae1ef"
})
})
What this will allow you to accomplish:
Transaction based bestsellers will appear right away on your various pages
Personalized product recommendations will appear from day one based on the imported data
User purchase history such as category affinity, brand affinities can be leveraged from day one
Please reach out to your CSM for feature availability, details and limitations.
Leveraging Offline (Store) Transactions for Cross-Channel Personalization
Has your customer bought something in store and you want to leverage that data for online personalization? An example of this could be a user buying a Dior perfume in store, and the online experience should now include Dior focussed merchandising, product recommendations or other experiences such as banner changes.
What is needed:
You can use Nosto’s GraphQL API to import offline orders
Offline orders imported through GraphQL API are included in product relations / scores, hence included in recommendations engine and merchandising as well as content personalization
Please note:
Offline orders are also included in product intelligence analytics and cannot be excluded
You have to mark orders as imported, so they will be excluded from the rest of the analytics such as overall Sales or Conversion rate
Orders are always being imported with order date = import date. We suggest a real time event stream over one-off bulk imports
Should you want to exclude offline revenue from statistics such as revenue you might lose ability to use Segments and affinity scores
Only orders imported during last 30 days would impact to best sellers and merchandising rules;
Only orders imported during the last 1 year would impact bought together relations. Orders that were imported more than 1 year ago would be ignored by reco engine;
Please reach out to your CSM for feature availability, details and limitations.
Supported CDPs
Nosto supports a variety of CDPs via API integration or directly out-of-the-box.
mParticle
Segment
Tealium