Create a Content Feed
Contents
Content Feeds are Sailthru-generated feeds of your site’s product or article pages as they exist in your Content Library, whether these items have been added via Google Product Sync (recommended), the Sailthru Content API, or the Personalize JavaScript spider. You can specify custom criteria for the content that will be included in a feed, and then use the feed to bring content into your email and web templates.
Create a New Content Feed
- On the Content tab, select Data Feeds.
- Click Add Content Feed.
- Enter a Feed Name.
- Using the Content Feed Configuration Options described below, specify which types of items from your Content Library should be pulled into the feed.
- Click Save.
- View current content and structure of feed.
To view the current content and structure of the feed, on the feed’s row, click the Preview icon . To review feed criteria and make any changes, click the wrench icon
to return to the configuration screen.
Content Feed Configuration Options
Setting Category | Options |
---|---|
Content Selection Determine whether to limit content recency and quantity of content items. |
Evergreen – Pull content regardless of its age When you select Evergreen, you will need to specify the following fields. Click each option name for more information. Repeat ChanceEnter a percentage value from 1 to 100. The lower the value, the less likely it is that a piece of content will be included in successive calls of the content feed. Maximum Items The greatest number of content items that the feed can include, though the feed may contain fewer items depending on your criteria and the number of available content items. The highest value allowed for this field is 3000. Weight Items Determines the formula for a weight parameter that will be added to each content item. Your template code can optionally use this weighting and/or individual user interests to help determine which content is be displayed and in what order. Unweighted Each content item is given an equal weighting. (A different subset content may still be displayed to each user based on their interests, but relative content age and pageviews will not further prioritize content.) Popularity Weighting correlates to the total number of pageviews of the item, regardless of its age. Reduced Heat Weighting favors popular content (based on total pageviews) but to a lesser extent also takes into account the recency of published content. (log(pageviews)/time. Heat Weighting favors content that is new and has a high number of pageviews for its age. (pageviews/time) Fresh – Only pull content that was initially added (spidered or submitted via the Content API) recently, within a timespan that you will specify. When you select Fresh, the following options are displayed. Click each option name for more information. Minimum ItemsThe fewest number of content items that the feed should include. For example, if you plan to use this feed to power an email that displays 10 content items, you should set the feed to contain at least 10 items (and perhaps many more if content is to be personalized). Maximum Items The greatest number of content items that the feed can include, though the feed may contain fewer items based on your criteria. The highest potential value for this field is 3000. Hours Back The maximum age of content according to when it was first spidered. A setting of 72 hours, for example, would only pull content that was added within the last three days. You can further prioritize the most recent content using a later setting, Weight Items. If Minimum Not Found Use the If Minimum Not Found option to determine what happens if the requested minimum-item quantity is not available within the selected time span. You can either choose to Go further back in time [beyond the Hours Back value] until the minimum number is found. Return a 404 (not found) error The feed will return a 404 [not found] error, which would prevent a scheduled campaign from sending if it is returned at the scheduled send time. Note: If you select “Go further back in time” and the Minimum Items quantity is still unavailable, a feed with fewer content items than the minimum will be returned. |
Weight Items Determines the formula for a weight parameter that will be added to each content item. |
Your template code can optionally use this weighting and/or individual user interests to help determine which content is displayed and in what order.
*The Sailthru Personalize JavaScript is required on your site for these algorithms to function, as they rely on pageview data. |
Filtering on Tags
Enter content tag values to include or exclude from the feed. These may have been included via Sailthru’s spidering of meta tags or the Content API. |
|
Ignore Expire Date |
|
Remove Out Of Stock
Displayed only for commerce accounts. |
If set to Yes, items are filtered out if they have an inventory field and its value is currently 0. |
Filter on Vars
Include/exclude content based on any custom meta tags on your content. |
For example, if you set a sailthru.category ormycategory meta tag for all your content, you can use Filter For Vars to create a feed that displays only items where that tag’s value matches sports content, or excludes all labeled as fashion.
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Content Feed Format
The Content Feed provides an array of content plus meta data, including:
- Content Feed Name
- Content Feed URL
- Content Feed Tag(s)
- Content Inventory (Stock Level)
Content Feed Meta Information
Consider a Content Feed with Filter For Tags set to: Demo tag, demo-tag-2, demo-tag3
This yields the following feed meta information. Click Preview to view the JSON:
"feed":{ "name" : "Content Feed Name", "url" : "http://cb.sailthru.com/ws/feed?id=1234567", "filter_tags" : ["demo-tag","demo-tag-2","demo-tag3"] },
Please note how the first tag, Demo tag, was automatically converted to the dashed-lowercase-format, demo-tag. This means that uppercase letters turn into lowercase, and space characters are replaced with dashes. This is done for the sake of consistency across tags.
Here are some examples of Zephyr code to pull specific values from the above feed:
{feed.name} |
Content Feed Name |
{feed.url} |
|
{feed.filter_tags[2]} |
demo-tag-3 |