Business Challenge
In an Open Time Email campaign I want to show Podcast recommendations to an audience at risk of churn. When testing this campaign I’m seeing Radio Stations recommended as well, why is this? Both content types are in the same Catalogue, and an Inclusion rule has been set to include only Podcasts. The recipe ingredients are Similar Items and Collaborative filtering.
If a recipe returns no results for a user, an OTE campaign will default to a trending lookup so that items are displayed in the email for every user. However the catch is that trending fallbacks ignore exclusion rules. This is why other items in a Catalogue can appear in recipe results.
You can disable trending fallback in the OTE Campaign setup, but this may result in an empty content block.
Similar Items and Collaborative Filtering recipe ingredients rely on the user having viewed Catalogue items recently. However as this audience is subscribers at risk of churn, their engagement is low, and so there is a percentage of no results returned by the recipe.
To enable recommendations to appear for all users (in OTE and Web Campaigns) while respecting inclusion/exclusion rules, there are some options:
Option 1: In the Collaborative Filtering ingredient allow trending fallback – make sure the checkbox to skip this feature is unticked. Collab filtering has trending built in, and eligible items respect existing exclusions, inclusions, and variations.
Option 2: Create a recipe with Trending as the only ingredient – inclusion/exclusion rules are respected.
Reading: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=mktg.mc_pers_einstein_recipe_fallback_strategies.htm&type=5