Choosing the right ID for your products is essential during the onboarding process.
The ID should reflect the products that users visit, search for, add to their basket, and ultimately purchase.
What’s even more important is that your ID should also reflect which products are visited in the same session and purchased by the same user. In the Raptor recommendation engine, the parameter ProductId serves as the primary key to combine and enrich data from all your different sources, including website tracking, historical orders, point-of-sale transactions, and attributes from your product catalog.
Therefore, the ID you ingest as the parameter ‘ProductId’ should be consistent across all your touchpoints.Let’s break down the different types IDs within a typical product catalog and how they are labeled in the Raptor controlpanel:
Level 1: MasterId
- The MasterId represents the product identifier without considering sizes, colors, or other variants.
- Multiple products of the same type may have different ProductIds, but they share the same MasterId.
Level 2: ProductId (Primary Key)
- This unique ID is used in your web store to identify the product. A good rule of thumb is to consider an item unique if it has a unique URL in your online store.
- The ProductId typically includes the MasterId along with variants such as color or type. For fashion items, this could be rendered as: ProductId = Master ID + color.
🔍 Note: As the name indicates this is the ID you will like to set as ProductId in the Raptor tracking
Level 3: ProductSKU
- The ProductSKU is a unique identifier for your product variants, considering attributes like color AND size.
- For fashion items, the SKU could be rendered as: ProductId = MasterID + color + size.
Illustration of product hierarchy:
⚠️ Important: Avoid including SKU-level information in tracking or the product catalog, since this ID serve no relevance regarding the product recommendations.
IDs explained
💡Example from the fashion industry:
Suppose you have a webshop selling T-shirts, offering both white and black T-shirts from the same collection. Your IDs would typically look like this:
Select the correct ProductId for your tracking.
If your shop sells goods with a single product identifier per item, the integration process is straightforward. Simply include your single ID as the ProductId parameter in the Raptor tracking.
When dealing with multiple levels of IDs, it’s crucial to send the identifier that uniquely represents the product in your web store.
This ID will be the ID that the Raptor Recommendation engine outputs in all touch points such as Website Recommendations and product images for E-mail Recommendations.
The Purpose of the MasterId.
When both ProductId and MasterId are set in the tracking, you can apply a filter within specific modules to exclude ProductIds with the same MasterId.
💡Example: It may be inappropriate to recommend products with the same MasterId in a product carousel. For instance, consider a product page where a user visits a green sweater. In this case, you wouldn’t want to display the same sweater in different colors; instead, you’d prefer to show other similar green sweaters, to help the user to find the perfect fit.
The MasterId is used here to exclude products with the same MasterId as the product the user is currently visiting.
⚠️Important:
- Do not mix IDs in the same tracking parameter. Be aware when you load historical data as well as point of sale data into the recommendation engine.
- Always send the same ProductId in all parameters concerning tracking of productIDs. This includes ProductId, BasketContent, and FavoritelistContent.
- If you want your E-mail triggers to fire on a ProductSKU with a specific size, etc. Abandoned Basket, you must create new parameters in the tracking template for this purpose.