Tracking Categories Being Viewed for Recommendations

One important factor for many types of recommendations on both content and product sites is what category is being viewed, and this is not something that is always necessarily set up by default with standard interactions monitoring setup.

If tracking category interests is significant for your content or product recommendations, or even perhaps your targeting campaigns, then you will probably want to set this up.

Setting Up Category View Tracking

There are a few different ways to either set Personyze to track category views, or to notify Personyze of it on the back end from your CMS.

The most important thing here is that the categories being tracked, however you choose to track it, must match the categories associated with products in your product feed.

The easiest way is if the category is relatively obvious from visibly or easily trackable elements of your page. These could include:

  • URL path structure where the category is clearly defined in each URL path
  • Clear indication of the category on individual product/content pages, so that Personyze can be set to track/scrape it by tracking that particular div or page element.
  • Firing the category view from your CMS to be received by Personyze, using Javascript.

First, go to Settings > Recommendations > Interest Tracking > Categories

recommendations category interest tracking

If you want to use the javascript method, you can click the button on the right, and you’ll be given a code, part of which will need to be auto-populated on your CMS with the particular category (or categories) being viewed, as the variable. When it does this, Personyze will receive the category they’re viewing, and take it into account for recommendations.

javascript tracking for recommendations

On the other hand, if you want to track the category being viewed by URL, grabbing directly from the page, or even other methods such as cookie variables, the menu on the left will be what you’ll want to use.

tracking for recommendations

Once the tracking is added, you should have category views being tracked for all your visitors, and be able to use them as factors in product or content recommendation algorithms.