Catalog Objects

Catalog objects and their relationships define the structure of your catalog. Personalization uses catalog objects to interpret and understand customer engagement and affinities. Examples of catalog objects include products, articles, blog posts, categories, brands, styles, and features. Personalization includes several built-in catalog objects, and you can create custom ones to meet your specific needs.

• Built-In Catalog Objects
  Built-in catalog objects enable you to quickly begin building your catalog and define its structure. Personalization uses catalog objects to interpret and understand customer engagement and affinities. Personalization collects behavioral data about your customers in the context of your catalog. Catalog objects can be standalone entities, or they can relate to one another to provide a more granular structure for your catalog.
• Cardinality and Category Hierarchy
  With Marketing Cloud Personalization, you can build category hierarchy using either the Category ETL or the Sitemap/Event API. Before building your category hierarchy, choose how you want to configure category cardinality. Then choose which build approach best suits your business needs.
• Create a Custom Catalog Object
  Personalization collects behavioral data in the context of the catalog that you create and uses catalog objects to assess and analyze customer engagement and affinities. You can add more detail to your catalog by using custom objects. The more detailed you make your catalog, the more granular your insights are regarding customer engagement and affinity.
• Customizing the Affinities Graph
  The Affinities graph displays affinities for objects that use a specific catalog object type as their Name value. You can define custom catalog objects to appear in the Affinities graph when viewing a unified customer profile.
• Strict Catalog Security
  When adding or updating catalog objects, use the Strict Catalog Security setting to determine how Personalization adds new items to your catalog, and how it updates an item’s information. When you enable the Strict Catalog Security setting, Personalization ignores catalog item metadata, such as attributes, unless it comes from a feed or an authenticated event source.
• Catalog Object Limits
  Marketing Cloud Personalization imposes limits per dataset for catalog objects and attributes.