Content recommendations

Content personalization is a powerful way to increase visitor engagement. For example, you can provide articles of specific interest on a news site. Content recommendations in Episerver are based on real-time website interaction, visitor profiles, and intelligent algorithms to suggest topics of interest.

A developer must first configure the tracking and associated personalization service, then you can start working with content recommendations by defining recommendation strategies. See the Episerver Personalization developer guides.

Using the Strategy block

The Strategy block, available for Episerver CMS, displays content suggestions based on a strategy such as popular content or what other users read.

  1. Go to Episerver edit view, add a new page (test in the following image), and click create a new block.

    Image: Add block

  2. In block type listing view, select Strategy Block.

    Image: Strategy block

  3. Enter a Name for the new Strategy block.
  4. Open the Default Strategy drop-down list and select a strategy.

    Image: Strategy settings

  5. Set the Number of recommendations, which is the maximum number of recommendation items you want to show in the block. (The actual number may be fewer.)
  6. Click Create. The block appears on the page.

    The following image shows that you could add two (or more) Strategy blocks, each with separate strategies (Default, and OtherUsersAlsoRead), even on the same page if you want to. 

    In edit view, you can choose another strategy to apply to the current page only, so you can apply different strategies using the same block. Open the context menu and select a new strategy from the Content Strategy submenu.

    Image: Select another strategy