Five Steps to Optimizing Revenue with ATG Recommendations

This document provides guidance into best practice for the implementation of ATG Recommendations on your website. Implementation of these guidelines will optimize revenue generation for your company.

GUIDELINE 1. Place the ATG Recommendations JavaScript on all pages of your website

Place the ATG Recommendations JavaScript throughout your entire website, not just on the pages you want recommendations to be shown. Proper installation of the JavaScript also includes having the "checkout code" (a different piece of JavaScript than the rest of the site) installed on the order confirmation page.

How will this optimize results?
ATG Recommendations uses many types of data contained in the shopping clickstream to understand a customer's entire experience. ATG Recommendations not only looks at the product a shopper is currently viewing, but also the pages the customer has looked at previously (including the order in which they were viewed) to understand how a customer is shopping. For example, by capturing when customers are browsing on category pages, searching for specific products or moving around brands or categories quickly, ATG improves the relevance of the recommendations delivered.

Just include the ATG Recommendations javascript and add the Clickstream Tracking Code and we will be able to see all of a customer’s behavior without additional work on your end.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" src="//static.cleverset.com/js/cleverset-2.js"></script>

<div id="cs-cfg" style="display: none">
  <dl class="cs-cfg">
    <dt>retailerId</dt><dd>Your Retailer Id</dd>
    <dt>productId</dt><dd>Your Product Id</dd>
    <dt>category</dt><dd>Non-product Page Category</dd>
    <dt>brand</dt><dd>Non-product Page Brand</dd>
  </dl>
</div>

GUIDELINE 2. Display multiple panels of recommendations

How will this optimize results?
You are not limited in the number of recommendation panels you can show on a page. Multiple recommendation sets give your customers more alternatives.

GUIDELINE 3. Place ATG Recommendations in easy-to-view locations throughout your website

1. above the fold
2. product detail pages
3. landing page
4. category pages
5. search pages – including "zero results" search pages
6. checkout page

How will this optimize results?

Placing product recommendations on more than just the product detail pages helps increase conversion rates, shopping cart value, and overall revenue per visit.

1. above the fold – Placing the product recommendations above the fold allows a customer to easily transition from one product to the next.
2. product detail pages – The first place you should place recommedations, but not the only place.
3. landing page – By showing product recommendations on the landing page we bring customers closer to the checkout process. ATG already has knowledge about the customer before they come to the site.
4. category page – By showing specific products on this page ATG Recommendations make it easier for customers to find the items that they may be interested in. Typically a customer will go to a category page and be presented with many options for items in the category. Sometimes they will be based on price, trends, brands, or even the manner in which the customer can organize themselves. Although the layout of 40 items on a page, or even 40 pages of items is very common, we’ve seen that you can help the customer while on these pages by suggesting recommendations and move them from browsing to buying more quickly. Although they still might navigate from page to page in the categories section, recommendations are continually updated to be more and more relevant. These recommendations are a very good way of helping borderline browsers dive deeper into your product catalog and help them find what interests them on your site.
5. search page including zero results – Many customers will search for an item you don't have or they may misspell the word and see no items that match. By placing recommendations on the search results page when no search results match, customers keep shopping – even if you don't have the exact item they are looking for.
6. checkout page- Checkout pages have proven to be a very successful place for showing customers products for last-minute purchases. ATG provides relevant cross-sell recommendations for the shopper based on what they've previously looked at and what they currently have in their cart

GUIDELINE 4. Call correctly-sized product images

For the best possible results, make sure you are calling the thumbnail images, not the larger display images.

How will this optimize results?
Thumbnail images are smaller and take less time to load than full sized images. Most recommendations will display thumbnail sized images, so downloading the larger images is a waste of customer bandwidth. Furthermore, an image on a website will look pixelated if it is not the same size as it is defined to be in the stylesheet. For the best possible results, be sure you are calling thumbnail sized images and that your CSS width and height definitions match the size of those images.

GUIDELINE 5. Make sure you have good text descriptions for your products.

In-depth product descriptions not only help the customer feel more comfortable with their purchase, it also helps ATG make better connections between the products.

How will this optimize results?
ATG extracts data from the text descriptions of your products. Complete product descriptions allow ATG to show products located deep in your product catalog that would otherwise be overlooked.

For more information, please contact us.