Deploy dynamic recommendations

You can use dynamic recommendations to create upload files and page requests to load recommendations to your website.

The best implementation option for Product Recommendations is dynamic. A dynamic implementation provides more up-to-date recommendations than flat file recommendations and gives you access to more product features such as A/B testing, personalization, search-term recommendations, and fallback recommendations. Also, future enhancements of Digital Recommendations focus on dynamic capabilities and not flat file capabilities.

To implement dynamic recommendations, use this process:

  1. Create two files:
    • The Enterprise Product Content Mapping File (EPCMF) is a file that defines each product, the category it belongs in (which must also be in the Enterprise Category Definition File), and up to 50 attributes about each product.
    • The Enterprise Category Definition File (ECDF) is a file that contains information that is used by Digital Recommendations to process recommendations. It defines a category structure where items are in only one parent category. The ECDF must contain all of the categories that are included in the EPCMF file and all parent categories.
    Digital Recommendations uses data in the ECDF and EPCMF and the offers, rules, and recommendation plans you configure in the user interface. For more information, see ECDF and EPCMF data files
  2. Use IBM® Digital Analytics Import to make them accessible to Digital Recommendations.
  3. Your website administrator inserts the cmRecRequest function, the cmDisplayRecs function, and one or more zone population functions to request the most recent recommendation data from Digital Recommendations. Recommendations data that is delivered to your website uses a Content Delivery Network (CDN).

For more information, see: