Recipes for recommendations
Recipes are used to determine which recommendations are given by a recommendation widget. For example, you can use recipes to show content items that were most clicked in the past week, recently viewed by the visitor, or most recently added to the index. You must select one recipe for each entity that is used in the recommendation widget.
In most cases, the initial set of recommendation widgets that integration specialists create for you will be sufficient. Each of these widgets comes optimized with the best recipe for its intended purpose.
For uncommon use cases, you might need to create a recommendation widget and use either a standard recipe or request a custom recipe from Sitecore support.
When selecting a recipe for a recommendation widget, you must choose one that works with the specific entity that you want to recommend. Some recipes work with all entities, but some are specific to one. When choosing a recipe as part of the recommendation widget creation process, you'll see a list of entities that each recipe is compatible with.
There are two types of recipes:
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Item-based recipes - work using input, such as the content item on the page or a category of content items. For example, this might be a recipe that recommends content items similar to the one the visitor is viewing. Only use an item-based recipe if you want to base recommendations on specific content items.
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Visitor-based recipes - work using information about visitors. Some of these recipes use information about the current visitor, such as content items they have viewed recently. Some visitor-based recipes use information about all visitors, such as the most-viewed or most-clicked content items across the whole site. Use a visitor-based recipe if you want recommendations to be based on popular content items or content items that are relevant to the current visitor's interests.
For visitor-based recipes or item-based recipes that rely on content performance metrics, you must integrate event tracking using the Sitecore Cloud SDK, the Events API or the JavaScript SDK and check that it is working correctly.