Product Recommendations are commonly used to help in product discovery and as a tool to drive conversion rate by increasing relevance, boost average order value when deployed as up- and cross-selling, facilitate increased purchases through personalisation and enhancing merchandising by using filtering.

For further commercial examples, strategies, tactics, please speak with your Customer Success Manager and checkout the Customer Hub.

In order to work each Recommendation campaign requires:

To get started with Nosto Product Recommendations you first want to learn about and configure your Placements which are the basic building blocks that manage how and where Nosto injects the Recommendations into your site.

Once you are familiar with Placements, a good place to start is with the preset campaigns. These presets are preconfigured so that you can first see how they work and then customise to suit your merchandising and business needs. You can edit or delete the presets as you need. You'll find them listed in the table on the Product Recommendations overview page.

Using the Nosto Debug toolbar you can also preview these on your site. To launch the Debug Toolbar, click on the launch preview icon from the page type view, or add ?nostodebug=true to your store’s URL, eg. www.myawesomestore.com?nostodebug=true .

Once you are ready to see the Recommendation campaigns live on your site, navigate to Settings to turn the master switch on and allow Nosto to inject the Product Recommendation campaigns into the Placements you have created and previewed on site.

There are a few main page types that are familiar to all e-commerce websites. These include the Front page (or home page), a Product page (the page with the product image and details), the Category page (a page with multiple products all belonging to the same category) and so on. The page type relates to the point in the customer journey where you want to place the Recommendation and can help you make the rest of the decisions around customisation and also reporting.

Using placements and segments you can decide where the Recommendation will appear on the page and who will see it. Use the default segment ‘Everyone’ for it to be visible to every visitor that lands on the page. Optionally you can use Lifecycle or custom segments to tailor and optimise experiences for different groups of visitors. In case you don’t have access to Segmentation and Insights, the default and only segment available is always “Everyone”.

If you only want the Recommendation to appear on or between certain dates, then you can use scheduling.

Tip: The Recommendation must be enabled for the campaign to run on schedule.

This is the algorithm that will be used within your Product Recommendation. These might be based on product or store performance, customer behaviour, or manually merchandised to suit your individual needs. Types based on product or store performance, for example best sellers and live feed, will use store performance data to fill the Recommendation slot. Types based on customer behaviour, for example browsing history or order related, are entirely personalised to that visitor.

Tip: we advise that you add a different fallback type in case there are not enough products to fill that Recommendation. Cherry-picked Recommendations will give you full control over what products appear, however will require more work to set up.

Unsure which Recommendation type to use on which Page type?

Here you have full control over which products appear in the Recommendation. You can include and exclude products by a number of different product and performance attributes.

Tip: The more filters that you have will reduce the number of products that match the filter, depending on your product catalog you might want to add a fallback to ensure that your Recommendation slot has enough products to fill it.

The visual look and feel of your Product Recommendations is handled by Templates. Basic knowledge of CSS can help you here, or you can speak to your development team or Nosto’s in-house team to further customise these to match your brand. You can use one template or as many as you need.

There are also a number of Advanced settings that you can use once you return to edit your Recommendation.

You can review, manage and analyse all of your campaigns in the Product Recommendations overview page.

Do remember to check out the Customer Hub for more information, tips and strategies!