Use marketer controls

Qubit’s Marketer controls provide a powerful way to customize our out-of-the-box recommendations strategies by applying global or per-experience promotion and blacklisting rules.

These controls improve product recommendations by adding a business logic layer that is overlaid on top of our algorithmic strategies and enable merchandisers and curators, who are often best placed, with the deepest product knowledge, to fine-tune the product carousel with recommendations that are more closely aligned with campaigns, promotions, and wider business goals.

You can use Marketer controls to promote and blacklist products. You do this by creating one of three rule types: Promote, Blacklist, or Conditional. Rules can be applied globally across all of your recommendations experiences or per-experience.

Rules consist of product attributes, which you can add singularly or in combination. For example, you might promote products based solely on the attribute category or combine this with another attribute, such as stock level.

In addition to attributes, Conditional rules allow you to also define a rule condition. A good example is where you want to promote products only if a condition returns true, e.g. promote belts if a customer is browsing products in the product category trousers or promote end-of-line products from a manufacturer where the stock level is below a certain level.

Example rule

In the following example, we see that the user has created a rule to promote products in the Modern Fashion brand that have less than 50 items left in stock. You might use this rule type to increase promotions of low-stock items:

It is important to understand that rules created for specific experiences will interact with global rules and any custom rules added by Qubit for your property. What does this mean?

Well, for example, suppose you added a global rule to promote products in the category Bed Sheets - Valences and a second rule for an experience that also promoted a smaller set of products, perhaps by product attribute, in the same category. In this instance, we would promote all products in the category, and then promote even further that smaller set of products targeted by the per-experience rule.

It is also possible that a product promoted in a globally-applied rule could be blacklisted by a rule for a specific experience. In this instance, for any experiences linked to the rule, the product would be blacklisted–blacklisting wins.

For each rule you create, we provide an indicative preview of how the rule will change the recommendations generated for the carousel. In the following simplified example, the user has created a rule to promote Bed Sheets - Valances, seeding the recommendation with the product Id of a bed P_PLN243330:

Let’s now take a look at how we add a rule and use the preview to see how our rule affects the products in the carousel.

Select your rule from the list to open it and select Edit

Make the necessary changes, and select Save to commit those changes

Open your rule from the list and select Delete and then select Delete a second time to confirm

Custom global rules can be added by your Qubit team when your specific use case is not covered by the rules available on the Recommendations page. Reach out to your Customer Success Manager at Qubit to discuss adding new rules or editing existing rules.

You can see which custom rules have been added to your property in your list of rules. These are rules with the type Custom. You can then view the rule construct by selecting it from the list: