Content Pages Datasets Overview

By creating Content Pages datasets, you can include the supplemental ecommerce content— articles, blog posts, buying guides, and other media—published on your site in search results in addition to products and category pages. Refer to Returning Content Page Records in Personalized Site Search Queries in the Monetate Developer Hub for example requests to the Personalized Search API.

Dataset Specifications

This table contains the attributes, also called columns or fields, that you must include in a Content Pages dataset.

Ensure that you escape commas and quotation marks that are natively part of a value, especially values for title and description. Refer to Comma Escaping in Product Catalog Specification for guidance and examples.

Any Content Pages dataset file that you upload must contain all the attributes in this table and only the attributes in this table. When you're creating a dataset schema, uploading a file that doesn't include one or more required attributes causes the file to fail validation. If you include additional attributes when creating a dataset schema, Monetate discards them without alerting you.

If you exclude any of the required attributes or include additional attributes when updating a dataset, then the update fails. The File Upload Error modal notes the absence of any required attributes or the presence of unknown attributes.

Refer to Failed Updates in Update a Content Pages Dataset for more information.

Any Content Pages dataset file that you upload must have the same value for the category attribute in every row of the file.

Therefore, you must upload a separate dataset for each category attribute value that you use. Refer to Multiple Content Categories, Multiple Content Pages Datasets for more information.

File Format

A Content Pages dataset file must be in the CSV or TSV format. Each attribute must have a column header. The file must use UTF-8 character encoding without a byte order mark (BOM).

Download this CSV file to view an example of a Content Pages dataset file with all the required attributes: Sample Content Pages Dataset (CSV).

You can use this sample as a template for your own Content Pages dataset files.

Understanding the category Attribute

When creating a Content Pages dataset, you can use a standard value that Monetate has established for the category attribute, or you can use a custom one that you create. The standard values are as follows:

• CMS — Value for any content page on your site that isn't a product detail page or product category page
• CATEGORY — Value for a product category merchandising page

You're not required to use one or both standard values to categorize your site's content pages. Instead, you can create custom values, especially if you want values that specify the content's genre, type, or purpose. Any custom value for the category attribute must start with an underscore character (_), such as _vlog for video blog entries. You can use uppercase or lowercase letters for custom values (for example, _vlog or _VLOG).

Determining a Content Categories Approach

The CMS standard value can apply to a range of content pages on your site so long as they're not product detail pages or product category pages. If you apply this value broadly to your site's qualifying content pages, then you could simplify the work necessary to upload and maintain the information about those pages in Monetate because using only a few category attribute values means having only the corresponding number of Content Pages datasets.

Conversely, you might have specific types of content on your site and want to better control their inclusion in Personalized Search results. In this situation you can create a custom category value for each content type and then upload a Content Pages dataset for each value. For example, a home improvement retailer has a blog on its site, a library of buyer's guide and basic skills videos, and a collection of DIY project instructions. The retailer could use the CMS value in the category attribute for the blog posts; the custom value _video for each page of the video library; and the custom value _project for each project page.

For Personalized Search to return any content page in search results, you must pass a specific value of the category value in the typeOfRecords array of the Personalized Site Search request. For example, if you use only the standard CMS value, then a Site Search request would include the MONETATE_CMS value in the typeOfRecords array. If you use the custom value _video in a Content Pages dataset and want to return pages from your site's video library in search results, then the Site Search request would include the _video value in the typeOfRecords array. Refer to Returning Content Page Records in Personalized Site Search Queries in the Monetate Developer Hub for more information.

As you consider how to categorize your site's content pages for the purposes of Personalized Search, keep in mind that using multiple values for the category attribute entails building and maintaining more site search query requests. Fortunately, these additional requests only have a minor impact on Personalized Search performance on your site.

Multiple Content Categories, Multiple Content Pages Datasets

Another factor to consider when determining how to categorize your site's content pages is that you must upload a separate Content Pages dataset for each value of the category attribute that you use. Your approach to categorizing the content pages for discoverability can therefore impact how many of these datasets that you create and maintain.

Consider again the example home improvement retailer that categorized its site's content pages using three different category attribute values. Consequently, the retailer must upload three different Content Pages datasets:

• A dataset that contains all the blog posts, and each row has the CMS value for the category attribute
• A dataset that contains all the video pages, and each row has the custom value _video for the category attribute
• A dataset that contains all the project pages, and each row has the custom value _project for the category attribute

So again, as you consider your approach to categorizing the content pages published on your site, keep in mind too that while creating and updating one or two Content Pages datasets potentially reduces the burden of dataset maintenance, you could potentially lose discovery reach by having one or two Content Pages datasets instead of many of them.