Listrak Product Recommendations provide the power to display products that dynamically update based on a contact's activity on your site. However, not all contacts are created equal and activities across contacts will differ. This differing activity may result in product recommendations not appearing for contacts, however this can easily be remedied by making a few tweaks. Learn more about the most common reasons product recommendations do not appear to contacts.

This first cause of product recommendations not appearing is often tied to the second cause listed below. A recipe determines the products that will appear in an email. If a recipe cannot display enough results a contact may see a blank result.

Restrictive recipes can occur when applying multiple additional filter ingredients to a recipe. A group of products that best fits the base ingredient is selected and then the filters are applied. Adding a large number of filters can reduce the number of possible results. If no results or too few results are available in tier 1 the recommendations engine will then pull results from the backup applied.

Backup recipes are used when main recipe cannot populate results for a contact. Contacts may not see results because they have no matching site activity, so the backup provides a different set of logic that can be used to display products.

If no backup is applied or too few results are available, a contact may see no recommendations in the email, but would still see any text or image headlines for the recommendations, or see a multi-column structure where one or more column does not display content.

Backups are needed because not every contact has activity on your site, but another reason product recommendations may not display is because no activity is specified. Half of the base ingredients and many of the additional filter ingredients use reference products, the items a contact browsed, abandoned or purchase, when determining what products should be recommended.

If the recipe contains words such as same, preferred, purchased, bought, or viewed reference data is required. When building a recipe the white bar under the base ingredient can be used to select one or more activity type. The numerical drop-down determines how many of the most recent products that match the activity types are used as reference products.

💡 Look for the 🛍️ icon in the Product Recommendations Glossary to learn which ingredients require reference data.

As mentioned in #2, backups, often labeled in Listrak as Tier 2 or Tier 3, are in place for when the tier above cannot recommend products. Recipes can comprise a total of 3 tiers, but often marketing recipes only require 2 tiers.

If the last tier uses reference data in a base or filter ingredient it may cause results not to display. The base ingredient of the last tier should not use reference data. If reference data is included in a filter ingredient the importance slider cannot be set to more than 90%. The last tier should be the most generalized strategy, think of it for people who just visited the site for the first time. These contacts will not have any activity so they will not have any data to reference.

Global Ingredients apply to every new recipe created by default and often serve two main purposes: 1) providing contacts with a positive experience (e.g. making sure the products recommended are in stock) or 2) tailoring recommendations to the company's specific marketing goals (e.g. not showing a specific category of products).

Over time, however, business needs and the data about your products may shift. You may need to update the logic of your global ingredients if you change how your products are handled, for example, if replatforming.

A second factor, like reason #4, is the use of filter ingredients. If a filter ingredient uses reference data it should not be set to more than 90% or some contacts may not have the required activity to display any results.

⚠️ Changing a global ingredient will impact all recipes where they are used. Reach out to your Account Manager or Listrak Support if you have any concerns as the change will immediately impact product recommendations results.