Ready to get started? Comfortable with what product recommendations are? Great, we can get started.

Remember that each product recommendation carousel is wrapped in what we call a campaign. What's a campaign, we hear you ask.

Here comes a definition... CAMPAIGN

Much like a marketing campaign, a campaign in the Merchandising Hub is framed around a well-defined goal and built around an idea, hypothesis, or the action points from a weekly trade meeting or sales results.

It's your why for adding product recommendations to your website. This could be something straightforward, like pushing a product line or brand to coincide with an offline in-store promotion, or something more complex like driving up average order value amongst shoppers of a particular product category who make frequent but low-value purchases.

There are five essential steps to adding product recommendations to your website.

Once live, we'll start to collect data, and within a short space of time, we'll begin reporting on the effectiveness of your campaign. Based on this information, you'll be able to decide what actions to take, and we'll help you with this by making some suggestions.

For now, let's concentrate on our five steps.

Right now, there are several locations where you can add product recommendations-it will depend on what placements have been built for you as to which ones are available.

Here we show two placements that you can choose from. One from your homepage and the other from your basket page:

INFO: There are a few rules around using placements, but we'll get to these in Step 1 - Where to add your product recommendations carousel.

Once you've decided where to add your product recommendations, you'll need to think about what products to show in your carousel and who should see them. We bind up the who (audience and catalog) and the what (recommendation strategy, headline, rules) into a recommendation. Campaigns can contain more than one recommendation, each with its own audience and catalog. We'll cover these aspects in more detail in Step 2 - What products to show and to who, so for now, we'll cover the basics.

You might decide to show your recs carousel to all the people that visit your site. Other times, you might choose to be more restrictive and only show it to a smaller group of people. You do this by building an audience.

In this example, we've built an audience by combining two attributes, Number of sessions AND Number of conversions:

TIP: There's also the option to upload a CSV file to build an audience based on data you've already got, like email addresses collected in-store or user Ids exported from a CRM.

If your property has multiple catalogs, as is the case for most multi-region retailers, you need to assign a catalog to each recommendtaion. This lets us know which set of products are eligible for a visitor with a speciific language and currency. To review the catalogs set up for your property, refer to the product catalog viewer.

Deciding what products to show starts with the selection of a strategy. This choice depends on your business goals. For example, you might be looking to increase conversions, build engagement through exposing more of your product catalog, or highlight trending products to inspire your customers.

In the Merchandising Hub, you can choose from one of Google's recommendations strategies or one of Qubit's. For each strategy, we provide details about where it is best used and the business goal.

You can find more information about each of our strategies in Recommendations strategies.

Next, you need to think about any rules you might want to add. You can use rules to blacklist products, for example, or only show some products based on one or a combination of attributes.

Here's an example:

TIP: Before moving to the next step, you can preview your carousel for web and mobile device. Previewing is a great way to make any changes at this early stage of the build journey.

You now need to decide what percentage of the people that qualify as your audience should see the carousel.

Suppose you defined your audience based on a specific location, like London. In this step, you will decide what percentage of your London-based visitors to show the content to:50%, 95%, 100%.

As an example, if you chose 50%, we would randomly assign half of the people in your audience to your campaign and the other half to your default website as the control.

INFO: Splitting your visitors in this way allows us to compare the effectiveness of your carousel against essential metrics like Conversion Rate (CR) and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV).

To give you an idea of how many visitors we would expect to see your product recommendations, we provide an estimate based on the last seven days of data:

In this step, you can decide to run your campaign according to a schedule. Scheduling is a good option if you would like to time a campaign to automatically start and end in line with weekend messages, late-night cut-offs, Black Friday messaging, or promotions.

Both the start date/time and end date/time are optional. You might leave out a start date, for example, if you want to have manual control over when the campaign starts but use an end date/time to pause it automatically.

In this last step, we allow you to review your campaign. You can preview it and make any changes you think are needed. We'll also show you the metrics we will track for the campaign.

If you are happy with what you see, you're confident you are targeting the right groups of visitors, and you've got the visibility split right for what you are trying to achieve, you can launch it.

Once launched, your visitors will start to see your recs carousel and generate the data needed to judge whether it has been successful.

Your campaign report is a great place to understand what's going on with a campaign. Of course, when you first launch it, we won't have collected enough data to start reporting:

We'll cover this in more detail in See how your campaigns are performing.