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Also bought product recommendations

Also bought is a personalised recommendation that shows the most popular products contacts purchase alongside a particular item.

Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

Also bought uses recent order behaviour to recommend products that are frequently purchased together. It identifies the most relevant item from a contact's latest order and uses this as the basis for generating suggestions. It's well suited to post-purchase journeys, where timely, product-led follow-up messages perform best.


Filtering behaviour

You can refine an Also bought recommendation by applying filters in the recommendation builder. For example, you can exclude products under a certain price.

Also bought recommendations always generate results for all products in the catalog, even if some products are hidden by recommendation rules. However, the returned results don't include any products that are filtered out by those rules.


Also bought recommendations in emails

When used in an email, Also bought recommendations look to the most recent order placed by the contact. If this order contains multiple items, the recommendation favours the highest value item. This is then set as the featured product.

Also bought is a strong recommendation for post-purchase emails.

In EasyEditor, dragging an Also bought recommendation block into an email allows you to configure its design and layout. Unlike other recommendations, Also bought has two views:

  • Simple: shows just the name of the featured product

  • Detailed: shows the featured product and its image

The Also bought product recommendation is designed for automated post-purchase marketing. It works best as a triggered send within a week of purchase.

For extended post-purchase marketing, the best next recommendation is more effective. It uses machine learning and collaborative filtering to give a more optimised recommendation for this phase of the contact journey.

Not suitable for bulk campaigns

The Also bought recommendation isn't intended for bulk campaigns. It doesn't produce optimal results as some contacts may have last purchased a long time ago. It can also slow down your campaign sending significantly.

Also bought recommendations on site

When used on your website, Also bought should be embedded on the template at the lowest level product page. The product page URL is then sent by the script to Dotdigital.

Onsite recommendations can be customised to use appropriate HTML and CSS to match your website.

Dependencies

To use Also bought, review the insight data dependencies for this type of recommendation.

You must also ensure:

  • Sync data to Dotdigital

  • Have orders for products in your catalog

  • Set product prices to greater than zero

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