Personalization

Personalization strengthens your search: it adds a personal layer to the overall relevance and experience of a user. Taking personal preferences into account can drive conversion by guiding users to your products that they like.

Starting at version 2 and higher, you can configure Personalization from the back office of your Magento store.

This feature is only available if your Algolia plan gives you access to Personalization. Please refer to the pricing page for more details.

How to configure

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

1. Enable personalization for your storefront:

   

2. Go to Stores > Configuration > Algolia Search > Personalization in your store’s Admin panel and select the events you wish 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

1. Save and clear your configuration cache. The enabled events will now be automatically sent to Algolia.

Algolia provides both Personalization and analytics, and while they work together, they have different purposes:

• Personalization: personalizes search results for your users. Algolia is only sent 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 it works

When personalization is enabled in Magento, view and click events are automatically sent to Algolia from the frontend of your store. Conversion events are sent from the backend using Magento’s default dispatched event observers.

User tokens

To personalize results, Personalization requires a userToken parameter for all events you track and for your search. The extension automatically handles the generation of this token.

For first-time customers (not logged in) an anonymous userToken is created by the Algolia search-insights library.

If a customer consents to using cookies on your site, the anonymous token is stored in the _ALGOLIA cookie. If consent isn’t granted, the token will be regenerated on every request: this means you can’t track that user’s activity or provide them with personalized search results.

To retain personalization data across sessions, once a customer logs into their account, a unique 64-character authenticatedUserToken is generated from Magento based on email address and customer ID. However, to comply with data privacy laws, this information is one-way encrypted to avoid exposure of 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

From version 3.14.x, to correlate activities that a user performs before and after logging in, Algolia tracks the entire customer journey by sending both the anonymous token and authenticated token with events. This ensures that activities performed before the login event are included when determining the customer’s shopping preferences.

The following table shows which tokens are used for the various scenarios that may occur during the customer journey:

The Magento extension retains the authenticated user token unless the customer explicitly logs out of their account. This is so you can continue personalizing their experience based on their authenicatedToken and not rely solely on a potentially ephemeral anonymous token.

Query tokens

In addition to tracking user activity for personalization, userToken also improves analytics accuracy by sending the Insights events token with queries.

However, because queries can only be associated with a single userToken, once a customer has logged in to their account the authenticatedToken is sent with all queries instead of the anonymous user token.

Cookie law compliance and user consent

In many regions and countries, it’s a legal requirement to obtain the user’s permission before storing data like the userToken in cookies.

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, which lets you append events to the list of pre-configured events.

There are three methods available in the algoliaInsights object that you can use to add a new Personalization event:

• trackClick
• trackView
• trackConversion

Each method requires an object with specific formatting for insights. You can easily create events in the correct format by using the buildEventData method on the algoliaInsights object. 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:

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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.tractView(eventData);
            // algoliaInsights.trackConversion(eventData);
        });
    });
});