Introduction

With the Catalog Alerts feature, you can deliver personalized and timely recommendations based on the changes in item price or quantity. By analyzing user behavior, such as items added to wishlists, viewed, or purchased, MoEngage cross-references this data with real-time catalog updates. After a catalog refresh, MoEngage identifies price and quantity variations, generating personalized item recommendations for you. You can then use these recommendations to trigger targeted campaigns, notifications, or personalized content, which enhances your engagement and drives conversion.

Use Cases

The Catalog Alerts feature helps you with the following use cases:

• Notifying users about a price drop on items in their wishlist.
• Notifying users about personalized discounts on products in your shopping cart.
• Notifying users about unavailable items that they visited are back in stock.
• Informing users that the flight tickets they've saved are now available at a lower price.
• Notifying users about tickets for their favorite movie are selling out quickly.
• Informing users that their monitored stock prices have risen by 30% since their last visit.

Create Catalog Alert Recommendations

To create a catalog alert, perform the following steps:

1. On the left navigation menu in the MoEngage dashboard, click Content and then click Recommendations. For more information, refer to Creating User Action Recommendations.
2. On the Recommendations page, click + Create recommendation. You are taken to the first step, Select recommendation model.
3. Click the Catalog alerts model and click Next. You are taken to the second step, Create recommendation.
   
4. On the Create recommendation page, perform the following steps:
   
   1. 1. Recommendation name: Type a name for the recommendation. 
      2. Recommendation description: Type a description for the recommendation. 
      3. Catalog: Select the catalog to which the recommendation is to be applied.
      4. Select the Trigger a business event check box to create a business event. (Optional)
         

         info

         Information You can select the Trigger a business event check box to automatically create a business event setup. This event can initiate business trigger campaigns and instantly alert users when the catalog is refreshed. The business event trigger can be set up for catalogs that use a scheduled file URL refresh or manual feed update. If a catalog has multiple refreshes scheduled (for example, hourly refreshes or several feeds in the selected catalog), the business event will be triggered only on the first feed refresh of the day. The business event can not be triggered for API based catalogs.

5. Under Generate recommendations based on catalog updates, perform the following steps:
   1. In the Select Catalog attribute list, select the price or quantity that needs to be compared with the respective last interaction.
   2. In the Select operator list, select the respective operator. In the value list, select/enter the permissible value, and in the Select type list, select the value type (for example, decreased by 30 percent).
   3. In the Select compare to list, select the respective attribute for last interaction that will be compared with the first selected catalog attribute (for example, last interaction price).
   4. Select and exclude the relevant list of respective Map user actions that needs to be considered for the interacted items (for example, Added to Wishlist in the last 15 days and exclude the Product Purchased items in the same last 15 days).
      
   5. To add filter criteria and control which items to recommend to their users, turn on the Filter items by item attributes toggle. These filters are applied over the recommendations of the Catalog alerts model. (for example, quantity is greater than 0).
   6. In the Sort the filtered items section, sort the recommendation results by MoEngage-derived attributes or any other numeric catalog attribute (for example, in the Order results by list, select Price percent change to sort the results from the highest to lowest).
      
   7. Click Create to save the changes and run the model.

Catalog Alerts Workflow

The Catalog Alerts feature calculates the change in price or quantity when a campaign is sent to users by comparing the current value in the catalog with the value from previous interactions.

For example, John has engaged in the following interactions within the last 30 days, as of April 30, 12:00 PM.

Analysis of John's Interactions:

To determine the relevant items for Catalog Alerts, MoEngage analyzes John's most recent interactions:

• Item P001 was wishlisted more than 15 days prior and will not be considered.
• Item P002 has two interactions; the most recent, on April 20 at 11:10 AM, will be used for price drop comparison.

Catalog Items (as on April 30, 10:00 AM Refresh):

Assume the catalog is refreshed every 12 hours. Here is a list of catalog items and their prices after the first refresh on April 30 at 10:00 AM. Item P004 was purchased in the last 15 days and will be excluded.

Based on the price changes and John's interactions, the recommended items are calculated as follows:

Calculate Recommended Items: 

To determine the price change, we compare the current price with the price at the time of the last interaction. This comparison can be done in two ways:

• By Value: The difference is calculated as: current price - last interacted price.
• By Percent: The percentage change is calculated as: ((current price - last interacted price) * 100) / current price.

Following this logic, in our example,

• Items P002, P005, and P007 are finalized for recommendation because they each show a price drop greater than 30%.
• Item P004, with only a ~20% price drop, does not meet this criterion and is therefore excluded.

Finally, MoEngage will sort these recommendation results by percent change type. The final list of recommendations will be in the following order:

Additionally, any item attribute filter will be applied to these items to refine the results as per the recommendation setup.

Business Event Trigger

A Business Event Trigger setup allows you to generate a business event following the first change detected in a catalog.

The generated event's naming convention follows the format: Catalog_Alerts_{{Recommendation_Name}}. For the provided example, the generated event name would be Catalog_Alerts_PriceDropAlerts.

You can use these events to automate user alerts or campaigns by creating business event campaigns in real time following the first change detected in the defined catalog attribute. For more information, refer to creating business event trigger campaign.

In this setup, the catalog is refreshed twice daily, say at 10:00 AM and 10:00 PM, but the business event will be triggered only at 10:00 AM after a successful refresh. However, you can configure other types of campaigns using the same recommendation setup at any schedule or delivery method, independent of the business event trigger.

Campaign Personalization

When you use Catalog Alerts, an additional attribute, the last interaction value is available for personalization. This value works with the current catalog attribute to clearly show users the difference in value within campaigns.

For example, the {{last_interaction_price}} placed next to the catalog {{price}} shows the actual difference in the price that has been detected, presenting higher confidence to click the campaign: