Personalized Product Listing Pages allow you to quickly and automatically tailor product listing pages to each visitor. Dynamic Yield returns the optimal order of products to display, with the most relevant products first to increase user engagement.
Dynamic Yield’s deep learning algorithm instantly personalizes the sorting of your product listings for each user in real-time based on all of the available data. You can apply this to one or more of your product listing pages, and measure the impact by using a control group with your default sorting.
To maximize performance on these pages, Dynamic Yield’s decision engine works via a server side API. Unlike Dynamic Yield recommendations, the API does not select which products to display, but specifies the optimal order of a set of products you provide. This means that you will keep your existing product listing page tech stack as well as the look and feel of your pages.
You can implement Personalized Product Listing Pages in Dynamic Yield projects of type API or Web. Currently, it is only available for US and EU customers.
Note: This is an early access feature. To join the early access program, contact your Customer Success Manager.
How Personalized Product Listing Pages Work
- A visitor lands on one of your product listing pages.
- Before the page is loaded, your site application server will call Dynamic Yield’s product-rank API with the list of products to display.
- Dynamic Yield analyzes the set of products and the visitor based on a deep learning algorithm and returns the same set of products, re-ordered by relevance for the visitor.
- Your site application renders the products in the specified order.
- Whenever a visitor clicks to see more products on the following page or filters the results, an additional call to Dynamic Yield should be made to re-order the results.
- Whenever a visitor clicks on a product, your site application should report the product clicks using a dedicated engagement API end point.
Deep Learning Algorithm
Personalized Product List Pages are based on an advanced deep learning algorithm. The algorithm is inspired by the structure and functionality of the human brain’s neural networks, and is designed to recognize patterns in the same way a human would.
The algorithm collects every user interaction to learn about the user’s interests, preferences, and intent.
In the background, we use a word2Vec algorithm to define how similar each product in your data feed is to every other product.
The algorithm then returns the products in order of relevance, defined by similarity to other products the user has interacted with.
Implementing Personalized Product Listing Page on your site
Enabling and activating personalized product listing page campaign involves two main steps. Details about these steps can be found in the procedures below.
- Implementing server-side API calls on every product listing page. For details, see the Developer Guide.
- Creating and activating a Product Listing Page Campaign. For details, see below.
Creating Personalized Product Listing Page Campaigns
Currently, you can only create one Personalized Product Listing Page campaign. However, you can call this campaign from as many pages on your site as you want.
Before the campaign will work, you need to implement server-side API calls on your site. For details, see the Developer Guide.
This procedure differs slightly depending on whether you are using a Dynamic Yield site of type API or Web.
- For API sites, go to API Campaigns › Add new › Product Listing Page
For Web sites, go to Site Personalization › Product Listing Page - Define the pages you will use in this campaign. The definition is based on the category defined in the page context of each page. Start with selecting whether you want to apply the campaign to all product listing pages, or only those you specify.
You can exclude specific pages based on their categories that you do not want to apply the campaign to. For example - if you have a seasonal product listing page (“Spring Sale”) that is manually merchandized for the next 2 weeks and you do not want to automate and personalize this page.
Select a category to exclude from the dropdown list generated from your product feed. The tag hierarchy does not matter, and any page whose context matches these categories will be excluded. (to check your page context, you can go to the URL and click on the DY button › Implementation helper and see the page context).
If you check the box, then any page whose context includes the specified category (can even be part of a hierarchy) is excluded.
Best practice: If you want to exclude a category at the bottom of the tree, specify all category tags in the page context of the page, and uncheck the box.
If you want to exclude a category that has subcategories, specify only the highest category you want to exclude and check the box.
For example, if you want to exclude the product listing page for Sneakers, you would enter “Shoes, Sneakers” and uncheck the box. If you want to exclude all shoes, you would enter “Shoes” and check the box.
- Measure the impact of your campaign by defining the allocation, primary metric, and advanced experience settings.
- Configure how much traffic to allocate to the control group, which will use your default sorting.
- Save and publish your campaign If you have not yet implemented the server-side API calls, publishing will have no effect on your site.
- After publishing and implementing the server-side API, you can preview the campaign by clicking the preview button on the top right, inserting a URL, and specifying if you want to view the results for the control group or view the personalized sorting. The preview will show the results and disregard any include/exclude conditions. To see personalized results, the current user has to have some interaction history (product pages and add to carts), so browse a little if you haven’t done so already. Make sure your application server is using the preview token as well.
- Review the results of your test in the reports.
Developer Guide and APIs for Product Listing Pages
To learn how to implement the APIs for Product Listing Page campaigns, see the Developer Guide.