Catalog

The Marketing Cloud Personalization platform can model key business objects as objects within a shadow catalog. This configuration happens within the Personalization catalog setup screens.

Catalog objects, such as products or articles, represent key business objects with which a user can interact. You can configure these objects with a name, labels, custom attributes, and related catalog objects. User behavior is tracked against objects as well as against their related catalog objects.

Catalog objects and object types can also have attributes that you can customize based on business requirements. You can configure custom attributes for objects in addition to objects that are already available to reflect supplementary information about the object such as price, date added, or image alternate text for products or author, subject, or keyword for blogs and articles.

A catalog object's attributes must satisfy the following conditions to be promoted and appear in Personalization Recommendations:

  • The value of the archived attribute must be false.
  • The value of the promotionState attribute must not be Excluded.
  • The expiration date (if any) must not be before the current date.
  • The published date (if any) must not be after the current date.

In addition to satisfying the conditions listed above, all catalog objects must have values for their name and url attributes. Additionally, objects of the type Product must also have a price greater than zero, an inventoryCount greater than zero, and a value for their imageUrl attribute.

The publishedDate attribute must be exclusively used for articles and blogs. For other use cases, create a new custom attribute.

Personalization uses Catalog and Profile Objects as foundational components to establish a thorough understanding of a customer's business context and a user's relations to that business context. Catalog Objects help build out an understanding of a customer's business. Additionally, catalog objects can be assigned to other catalog objects as related catalog objects to further describe those objects or define relationships between catalog objects. Examples of catalog object types include products, articles, blogs, promotions/offers, brands, styles, categories, and so on.

Profile Objects improve data dimensionality by allowing you to configure and manage customizable objects on a profile in addition to the profile attributes already available. You can set up profile objects the same way you configure catalog objects. You can also assign related catalog objects to profile objects. Data stored within a profile object is accessible via a set of out-of-the-box rules, allowing you to leverage this data for insights and cross-channel experience activation. Real-world examples of Profile Object types include Product Registrations, Vehicle Lease, Home Mortgage, Service Cases, and so on.

Interactions model a user's interaction with an object. Examples include:

  • View
  • Add to Cart
  • Purchase