Category & Interest Recommenders — Recommend a Section, Not an Item

Every other recommendation widget answers “which item should this visitor see”. These two answer
a different question: which part of the site should they go to next — a product category, or an
article topic.

It is a small difference with a large consequence. A visitor who does not yet know what they want cannot be sold a
specific jacket; they can be shown that Outerwear is where their kind of visitor ends up.

The two actions

They are the same engine in two vocabularies, and both are built in the same three-step editor as any other
recommendation: Select Recommendation Algorithm, Customize Look & Feel,
Placement, Trigger & Frequency.

When to reach for one

• The homepage of a first-time visitor. There is no browsing history to recommend products from, but
  there is always a most-popular category — and it is a better first question than a carousel of arbitrary
  items.
• After a purchase. The thank-you page is the wrong place for another of the thing they just bought,
  and the right place for the aisle next door.
• A dead end — an empty search, a 404, an out-of-stock product. A category is something to
  offer when there is no item to offer.
• Publishing. On a content site, “more like this” at the topic level often beats another
  single article, because it commits the reader to a direction rather than one more page.

What it can show

Each recommended category or topic can carry its name, an image, and a
count of what is inside it — “6 items”, “3 articles”.
The count is worth showing: it is the difference between a label and a promise of something behind it.

The designs

The same recommendation, three ways. Which one you pick is a layout decision, not an algorithm one — every
design works with every algorithm below.

• Tiles — image-led cards with the name set over the photograph. The most prominent, and the
  one that works as a homepage section in its own right.
• Strip — round thumbnails in a row, the pattern shoppers already know from category
  navigation. Quiet enough to sit under a header.
• List — names and counts, no images. For sidebars, narrow columns, and catalogues whose
  categories have no artwork worth showing.

The interest recommender uses the same three, in the content vocabulary:

The algorithms

Eleven, and they pair across the two actions — the same engine, named for what it reads. Pick the row, then
the column for the kind of site you have.

What it needs before it can return anything

• For categories: a product catalogue whose items carry categories, and category tracking on your
  pages so the engine knows which category a visitor is in. See
  Categories
  tracking.
• For topics: interests
  set on your articles — from the feed, from the contextual engine, or by hand.
• An image per category, if you want the tile or strip design. The list design needs none.

Related

• Recommendation algorithms — the item-level engines, and how the page anchor works.
• Categories tracking
• Interests for recommendations
• Setting the product / content feed