Monetate highly recommends that you implement a product catalog because doing so unlocks additional capabilities within the platform. A product catalog is required for Product Recommendations, Personalized Search, and certain other features. Uploading a product catalog has the added benefit of allowing you to target products in the WHO settings of an experience by hierarchy, category, or product attribute that you've specified within the product catalog.
Monetate's product catalog specification is loosely based on Google's product data specification. Refer to Product Catalog Specification for the required and optional attributes for a product catalog dataset.
Uploading a Product Catalog
You can upload a product catalog three ways to the Monetate platform:
You can upload as many catalogs as you want under a single account as long as they share product IDs (item_group_id) and categories (product_type). All categories (product_type) across catalogs within an account must be in the same language. If you share a single Monetate tag across multiple domains (for example, multi-brand), you must supply Monetate with a single product catalog.
File Format Requirements
The product catalog file must be in one of these formats:
- CSV
- TSV
All CSV product catalog files should adhere to the following requirements:
- Each field must have a header.
- Every entry uses quotation marks (") around each field for accurate parsing of data. These quotation marks are especially important for fields with line breaks, quotation marks, or commas. See Comma Escaping in Product Catalog Specification for more information.
- A double quotation mark (") included in a field must be represented by two double quotation marks.
- Character encoding must be UTF-8.
Download this CSV file to view an example of a product catalog file with all the required attributes: Sample Product Catalog (CSV).