Preview a Recommendation Strategy

You can preview most recommendation strategies in an account from the strategy configuration page within the Monetate platform. There are a few exceptions:

  • You're still building the strategy and haven't clicked SAVE.
  • The recommendation strategy includes a recommendation filter that uses a dynamic value.

Sometimes the platform is still processing a part of the recommendation strategy, and thus you're unable to to preview the strategy's results until that processing is complete. When this situation arises, you see this notification on the strategy's configuration page.

Callout of the notification that a preview is unavailable

When you encounter this notification, you may need to wait up to 24 hours before you can preview the recommendation strategy.

Follow these steps to generate a preview of a recommendation strategy.

  1. Select Product Recommendations from COMPONENTS in the top navigation bar.

    Callout of the 'Product Recommendations' option in the COMPONENTS menu

  2. Click the Recommendation Strategies tab.

    Callout of the Recommendations Strategies tab

  3. Click the name of the recommendation strategy that you want to preview.
  4. Click Preview Results.

    Callout of the Preview Results button

  5. If the recommendation strategy uses a collaborative recommendation algorithm, then type at least one valid product ID (PID) or SKU into PID or SKU, and then press Enter to generate the preview.

    You can enter up to five PIDs or SKUs for generating a preview of results. You can remove any PID or SKU that you enter by clicking the X next to it. The PIDs and SKUs must appear in the product catalog.

    Callout of the 'PID or SKU' field on the 'Preview Purchased and Also Purchased' modal

The Preview modal only shows up to 10 products. However, the total recommended products returned by the recommendation strategy appears in the modal so that you can better understand the possible impact of the strategy as configured.

Callout of the Returned count in the Preview modal

If you click Preview Results when viewing a recommendation strategy that includes a recommendation filter that uses a dynamic value, then this warning appears in the Preview modal instead of results.

The Preview modal with the 'Recommendation with dynamic filters cannot be previewed' warning message

If you change any settings of the recommendation strategy after previewing it, you must click SAVE before you can generate a new preview.