What’s New with Algolia Recommend: Spring Release showcase recap webinar

Catch up on our Spring Release Showcase

Every day customers receive an overwhelming amount of recommendations. How do you guide them and make your online experience stand out?

Algolia’s Rachel Ward, Principal – Customer Lifecycle Marketing, and Ben Pusey, Director – SME, Business Strategy and Optimization, hosted our latest Spring Release Showcase webinar where they revealed Algolia Recommend’s new product updates. 

We’ve gathered the highlights from the talk below where they explored how businesses can boost revenue, build loyalty, and create the best digital experience for their customers by providing robust and relevant recommendations. You can also watch the full webinar on demand.

Why we care about recommendations  – Search by itself is no longer enough. Recommendations have become an integral part of today’s online discovery experience. Whether your customers are buying a new product, consuming content you’re publishing, locating specific information, or even looking to solve a customer issue, you need the right recommendations that can better engage your customers, increase your revenue, and give you a competitive advantage. Read more in our recent article Why we recommend Recommend to make recommendations.

Algolia launched Recommend in 2021 to help our customers face this challenge and, as with any new product, there’s always room for further growth. The Spring 2022 updates that we’re sharing here were built based on feedback directly from our customers. Read on to learn more about our new core capabilities and other exciting updates to Algolia Recommend.

Challenges our customers face – Businesses are constantly being expected to deliver the right content and the right context at the right time. Features that were once considered cutting edge have very quickly become table stakes. Companies like Amazon and Netflix have set a high bar when it comes to recommendations — that level of guidance is what people expect, even when they’re looking at the websites of smaller businesses.

We set out to equip our customers with the best recommendations so they can provide the strongest, most relevant results. Since Recommend’s launch, we’ve had many successes with our customers. With our most recent updates, we anticipate even more. 

What we’ve developed to solve these challenges – Choice overload can lead to dissatisfaction, wasted time, and sometimes even paralysis. Product and content recommendations are accounting for a large part of the discovery process.

Algolia Search has helped our customers power 70% of their revenue with unique and differentiated search experiences. And now with Recommend, our customers are able to drive the remaining 30% with product and content recommendations. Algolia Recommend helps your developer teams build differentiation, power recommendations on any channel, increase online revenue as well as drive customer engagement, and ultimately improve your overall customer experience.

Who can use Recommend? – Our ecommerce customers love Algolia Recommend, but we’ve adjusted it to also make it more applicable to non-ecommerce businesses. Wherever your content is, we can now help you make helpful recommendations based on it. Our related content model works using a hybrid engine, as well as collaborative filtering and user signals to deliver high quality recommendations. 

As a result of these updates, we expect content-related businesses to see increased engagement, time on site, and brand loyalty with reduced churn. We’ve also found that the related product model has a positive impact on Average Order Value (AOV), conversion rate, items per order, and we have structured our related content model in Recommend after this.

What’s new with Recommend? – As part of our Spring 2022 update, we’ve got four new things to share regarding Algolia Recommend, including two new core capabilities. One of them is our hybrid recommendation engine, which we built to deal with sparse data and cold start problems. Our trends model lets you produce dynamic content blocks based on real customer interactions i.e., real data. The related content model is much more tailored towards non-ecommerce applications. You can read more about these updates in our blog post on Algolia Recommend updates. 

We’ve also got our rules engine, which sits over the top of our Recommend product, and that lets our customers use whatever business logic or market knowledge they have to enhance and refine recommendations. The new rules feature allows our customers to continue to create unique and custom experiences for their customers. The rules work in a very similar way to how they do on Algolia Search. Overall, you’re able to fine-tune the recommendations to your business model and your trading strategy.

Missed our updates? Watch the full webinar to learn what’s new with Algolia Recommend, then request a demo to experience Algolia Search and Recommend for yourself.