Streamlining Personalization: Automating Catalog Creation for Adobe Target Recommendations

In today’s digital-first world, personalization drives engagement and conversions. From product suggestions on retail websites to curated playlists on Spotify, recommendations have become integral to customer experiences. Adobe Target Recommendations takes this concept further, offering marketers powerful tools to deliver personalized content, products, and media across channels.

Recommendations are all around us, extending far beyond just products. With Adobe Target Recommendations, you can personalize every aspect of the customer experience—whether it’s suggesting products, articles, videos, downloads, songs, or other content. Powered by advanced algorithms and offering complete marketer control, it ensures every recommendation is tailored to engage and convert.

Why Recommendations Matter

Recommendations aren’t just about upselling; they shape customer journeys. Consumers today expect businesses to anticipate their needs and preferences, from the articles they read to the products they buy. Here's why recommendations are pivotal:

• Familiarity: Everyone has bought something because of a recommendation—whether it’s a “similar items” section on an e-commerce site or curated playlists on a streaming app.
• Relevance: With endless choices available, personalized recommendations cut through the noise, guiding customers toward what matters most to them.
• Engagement: From increasing clicks to improving customer lifetime value, well-placed recommendations foster deeper connections with users.

How Adobe Target Enables Personalized Recommendations

Delivering exceptional recommendations is all about relevance and personalization. Adobe Target achieves this through three core capabilities:

1. Marketer Controls for Enhanced Relevance Marketers play a crucial role in shaping the effectiveness of recommendations. With Adobe Target, you can fine-tune algorithms to prioritize the attributes most relevant to your audience. For instance, on a video platform, users might care about movies from the same director rather than the production studio. Adobe Target empowers marketers to embed their domain expertise directly into recommendation models, ensuring more meaningful and effective results.
2. Sophisticated Machine Learning Models Managing millions of catalog items and analyzing interaction events requires robust technology. Adobe Target leverages over a decade of machine learning expertise to power its recommendation engine, handling billions of recommendations annually. This ensures your audience receives the most accurate and impactful suggestions.
3. Context-Aware Personalization Timeliness and context are key to effective recommendations. Adobe Target’s advanced user profiles enable dynamic, real-time personalization. For example, it avoids suggesting a video someone just watched or recommending a shirt they’ve already added to their cart. Instead, it focuses on delivering content that resonates in the moment.

By combining marketer-driven controls, advanced models, and user context, Adobe Target provides a seamless and highly personalized recommendation experience for any use case or channel.

Defining Your Recommendations Strategy

Crafting an effective recommendations strategy begins with clear goals and thoughtful planning. Here's how to approach it:

1. Identify What to Recommend Determine the type of content you want to showcase—whether it’s products, videos, articles, or other forms of media.
2. Decide Where to Recommend Consider the channels and touchpoints where recommendations will have the most impact. Will they appear on your website, mobile app, in-store displays, or other platforms? Think about the customer journey and the specific pages or interactions where recommendations can drive value.
3. Evaluate the Impact Test and compare experiences: one without recommendations and one with recommendations (or even different types of recommendations). Define how you'll measure success. While metrics like Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) can be abstract and challenging to measure, focus on concrete metrics such as revenue per visit, average order value, or click-through rates. In some scenarios, minimizing metrics—like reducing the number of support calls—may also be a priority.

By aligning your recommendations strategy with your business goals and tracking actionable metrics, you can optimize the customer experience and maximize the impact of personalized content.

Recommendation Types in Adobe Target

Adobe Target enables businesses to deliver tailored recommendations across various contexts, optimizing user engagement and driving conversions. Below are the key recommendation types, their locations, and purposes:

These recommendation types can be strategically deployed across different channels and stages of the customer journey, helping to maximize user satisfaction and business impact.

Complementary Items for Empty Carts

Even when a shopping cart is empty, cross-selling complementary items can re-engage customers and inspire purchases. By showcasing relevant products—such as accessories for a recently viewed item—you can encourage users to continue their shopping journey. For example, a prompt like "People who bought this also bought that" can effectively drive interest and conversions, even from an initially empty cart.

Catalog Feature in Adobe Target Recommendations

The Catalog feature in Adobe Target Recommendations allows you to manage and inspect all the items—such as products, articles, or videos—that you might want to recommend. Each item, or "entity," is described by data points called "attributes," including details like Product ID, Name, Category, Brand, Inventory, Price, Color, and Thumbnail Image URL. This robust catalog ensures your recommendations are tailored and data-driven.

You can view complete item details, including the description, inventory, page URL, thumbnail image URL, and more. Additionally, items can be removed from the catalog directly from this page.

To perform a new search, type "apple" into the search box and expand the Category filter to select "Equipment." You’ll see results filtered by Category: Smartphones. To view all products in the Smartphones category, remove the "Search: Apple" tag from the filters. Use the filter list on the left to apply additional criteria and refine your Catalog Search results.

Sending Catalog Data to Adobe Target Recommendations

Adobe Target offers several flexible methods to upload and maintain your catalog data, ensuring your recommendations remain accurate and up-to-date:

1. Feeds Upload your product catalog using CSV files or Google Product Feeds (XML) on a daily, weekly, or biweekly basis. This is the simplest way to ensure your entire catalog and all its attributes are imported. Feeds can be fetched from an HTTP/HTTPS URL or an FTP/FTPS server. If you use Adobe Analytics, you can also leverage its Product Classifications as a feed for seamless integration.
2. Entities API The RESTful Entities API allows you to create or update catalog items in real time, making it ideal for dynamic updates from systems like Product Information Management (PIM) or Content Management Systems (CMS). For detailed implementation, refer to the Target Recommendations API documentation on the Adobe Target Developers portal.
3. Target JavaScript (aka mbox) Use Adobe Target’s JavaScript functions to pass catalog updates directly from your website. Typically used on product detail pages (or equivalent pages like video or article views), this method is especially useful for frequently changing attributes, such as inventory levels or pricing.

Best Practices for Catalog Updates

For most scenarios, start with a periodic feed file (daily or weekly) to upload the bulk of your catalog data. Use the Entities API or Target JavaScript to make timely updates between feed uploads when necessary.

Pro Tip: Always refresh your product catalog at least once a month. Adobe Target automatically removes products from the catalog if they haven’t been updated within 60 days, ensuring your recommendations stay relevant.

This multi-faceted approach allows you to maintain a comprehensive, accurate, and timely catalog, empowering Adobe Target to deliver highly personalized recommendations.

Automation for Efficient Data Management

Handling large datasets manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. Automation simplifies this process, ensuring your product data remains accurate and up-to-date while minimizing manual effort.

Key benefits of automation include:

• Processing: Extracting relevant product details from source files.
• Uploading: Automatically transferring processed files to an FTP server.
• Archiving: Storing uploaded files to prevent duplication and maintain an organized workflow.

By automating these steps, businesses can streamline catalog updates, ensuring error-free and efficient data management.

Using Feeds for Catalog Updates

Adobe Target makes it easy to manage catalog data through feeds. Navigate to the Feeds section in the left-hand bar to view and configure feeds for automated uploads. This approach is ideal for scheduling periodic updates, such as daily or weekly catalog imports.

For detailed code to automate feed updates, refer to my GitHub repository. This resource provides a ready-to-use script to simplify and automate the process of updating your Adobe Target feeds, ensuring your data is always current and aligned with your recommendation’s strategy.

Conclusion

Automating catalog updates in Adobe Target Recommendations is a game-changer for businesses looking to deliver personalized, data-driven experiences at scale. By leveraging features like feeds, APIs, and JavaScript, alongside automated scripts for data processing, uploading, and archiving, you can maintain an accurate, up-to-date catalog effortlessly. This not only saves time but also ensures error-free and relevant recommendations that engage users and drive results.

With Adobe Target’s robust tools and automation capabilities, you can streamline your recommendations strategy, focus on delivering value, and elevate the personalization experience across every channel. Now’s the time to embrace automation and make the most of what Adobe Target has to offer!