Providing personalized product recommendations is essential for enhancing customer experience and driving sales. However, displaying recently browsed or carted products in recommendation blocks can lead to redundancy and missed opportunities to showcase new items.
Example use cases
Post‑purchase engagement campaigns
A customer has just bought a pair of running shoes. Instead of showing the same shoes again in recommendations, you exclude recently purchased items and highlight complementary products, like running clothes or accessories to encourage add‑on sales.
Returning visitor freshness
A visitor browsed laptops three days ago and added one to their cart but has not checked out. Removing those same products from recommendations lets you feature either upgraded models or related accessories, keeping content fresh and inspiring a return visit.
Seasonal bestseller rotation
During a big seasonal sale, avoid repeating a customer’s recent browsing history. This lets you showcase trending sale products they might have missed, increasing variety and discovery.
Solution overview
Apply the Exclude Recent Activity filter to your Recommendation SmartBlocks that removes products a customer has recently purchased, carted, or browsed within a set timeframe. By excluding these items, you maintain novelty in your recommendations, encourage new product discovery, and improve the relevance of suggestions, all while ensuring that customers don’t see the same products over and over.
Step by step guide
Create your Recommendation SmartBlock
Navigate to Content > SmartBlocks.
Select CREATE SMARTBLOCK.
Set Placement to Website and select Product list.
Set the tactic and layout.
Complete the setup wizard to configure placement and name.
2. Configure recommendations
Go to the Properties tab and configure:
Tags
Campaign tracking
Merge parameters
Go to the Design tab and configure the look and feel of your recommendations.
Go to the Data Sources tab and configure your data sources.
Consider using AI‑driven sources for personalised recommendations, and crowd‑sourced sources to show your bestsellers.
Go to the Filters tab and configure filters.
3. Add Exclude Recent Activity filters
Go to the Filters tab.
Drag and drop the Exclude Recent Activity filter into the list of filters on the right.
Select the signal to target (Purchased, Carted, or Browsed) and set the time period.
For example, Exclude products purchased in the last 14 days.Consider stacking this filter more than once for different behaviors, for example, exclude recently purchased, carted, and browsed products all together.
4. Test and deploy
Select Save and Use to add the SmartBlock to a Slot.
Test and deploy as with any other content you create.
Consider split testing two identical recommendation blocks, one with the Exclude Recent Activity filter, and one without, to see how freshness impacts engagement and conversions.
Use shorter timeframes, for example, 3–7 days, for categories with frequent repeat purchases, and longer timeframes, for example, 30 days, for high‑value or one‑time buy products. This balance keeps recommendations relevant without removing too many items.