Personalization

Personalization strengthens your search. It adds a personal layer to the relevance and experience of a user. Taking personal preferences into account can drive conversion. It guides users to products they like. With versions 2 and later, you can configure Personalization from the back office of your Magento store.

This feature isn’t available on every plan. Refer to your pricing plan to see if it’s included.

Configure Personalization for Magento

You can’t personalize user experiences if you don’t know their preferences. To learn about these preferences, you must capture storefront signals (events).

Enable personalization for your storefront:
Go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > Personalization in your store’s Admin panel. Select the events you want to track:
- View events
  - Viewed product
- Click events
  - Product clicked
  - Product recommendation clicked
  - Facet clicked
- Conversion events
  - Product added to wishlist
  - Product added to cart
  - Placed order
Save and clear your configuration cache. The enabled events are now automatically sent to Algolia.

Algolia provides both Personalization and analytics. They work together, but they have different purposes:

Personalization personalizes search results for your users. Algolia only receives the data required to support this feature.
Analytics tracks search effectiveness or performs things like A/B testing. For analytics, you need to enable click and conversion events.

How Personalization works with Magento

When you enable personalization in Magento, your storefront automatically sends view and click events to Algolia. These events come from the frontend of your store. Magento’s backend sends conversion events using its default dispatched event observers.

User token

Personalization requires a for all events you track and for search. The extension automatically handles the generation of this token. For first-time customers who aren’t logged in, the Algolia search-insights library creates an anonymous userToken. If a customer consents to using cookies on your site, the anonymous token is stored in the _ALGOLIA cookie. If a customer doesn’t grant consent, Algolia regenerates the token on every request. This means you can’t track that user’s activity or provide personalized search results. To keep personalization data across sessions, Magento generates a unique 64-character authenticatedUserToken. It creates this token once a customer logs into their account. It bases this token on the customer’s email address and customer ID. To follow data privacy laws, Algolia encrypts this information one-way. This avoids exposing any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) in the underlying event data. Algolia stores this token in a cookie named:

_ALGOLIA_MAGENTO_AUTH from version 3.14.x
aa-search for previous versions.

The token persists for a year. The cookie is only updated when the user logs in again. If the customer logs out explicitly, the cookie is deleted.

Customer journey

Starting with version 3.14, Algolia tracks the entire customer journey. Algolia does this to correlate activities a user performs before and after logging in. It sends both tokens with events. This includes the anonymous token and the authenticated token. This means Algolia includes activities performed before the login event when determining the customer’s shopping preferences. The following table shows which tokens apply to each scenario in the customer journey:

	`userToken`	`authenticatedUserToken`
First time visitor
Customer logs in
Customer session expires
Customer logs out

The Magento extension retains the authenticated user token unless the customer explicitly logs out of their account. This lets you continue personalizing their experience based on their authenticatedToken. You don’t need to rely only on a potentially ephemeral anonymous token.

Query token

The userToken tracks user activity for personalization. It also improves analytics accuracy. It does this by sending the Insights events token with queries. Queries can only use a single userToken. Once a customer logs into their account, Algolia sends the authenticatedToken with all queries instead of the anonymous user token. In many countries, you must get the user’s permission before storing data in cookies, such as the userToken. For information about how the Algolia extension determines consent, see cookie law compliance .

How to track custom Personalization events

You can add custom events for Personalization with the afterInsightsBindEvents frontend event. This hook exposes the algoliaInsights object. Use it to append events to the list of pre-configured events. The algoliaInsights object has three methods for adding new Personalization events:

trackClick
trackView
trackConversion

Each method requires an object with specific formatting for insights. Use the buildEventData method on the algoliaInsights object to create events in the correct format. To create a personalization event in the correct format, buildEventData requires an eventName, objectID and indexName. The following code snippet shows how to add a custom click event using the afterInsightsBindEvents hook:

JavaScript

algolia.registerHook("afterInsightsBindEvents", function (algoliaInsights) {
  var selectors = document.querySelectorAll(".class-selector");
  selectors.forEach(function (e) {
    e.addEventListener("click", function (event) {
      // selector in this example has an data-objectid attribute
      // with the objectID as the value
      var objectId = this.dataset.objectid;

      // use the buildEventData function to format event data
      var eventData = algoliaInsights.buildEventData(
        "Clicked Event Name", // eventName
        objectId, // objectID
        algoliaConfig.indexName + "_products", // indexName
      );

      algoliaInsights.trackClick(eventData);

      // Available methods
      // algoliaInsights.trackView(eventData);
      // algoliaInsights.trackConversion(eventData);
    });
  });
});

​Configure Personalization for Magento

​How Personalization works with Magento

​User token

​Customer journey

​Query token

​Cookie law compliance and user consent

​How to track custom Personalization events

Configure Personalization for Magento

How Personalization works with Magento

User token

Customer journey

Query token

Cookie law compliance and user consent

How to track custom Personalization events