Einstein localized recommendations not working

Question

We've implemented Einstein Email Recommendations for a client of ours, everything works well except for the localization. We set up our product catalog with the attributes for each country (Product name, price, product link etc.). An example of one of our localized columns is this column, which contains the product url for Sweden:

locale_sv-SE_product_url

We set each column up this way for each countrycode we have. According to the documentation (https://help.salesforce.com/articleView?id=mc_pb_localized_recommendations.htm&type=5), we should add a "locale=" parameter to the end of the Einstein URL in the HTML and we should see the localized attributes in the Email Recommendation based on the countrycode we place after "locale=". However, this is not working for us. It still shows the 'default' attributes and seems to completely ignore the "locale=" parameter.

Does anyone here have any experience with localized Einstein recommendations and can see what we might be doing wrong? Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

It is important to verify the localized fields have been identified as such. To do so, go to "Personalization Builder > Email Recommendations > Admin > Catalogs > Gear Icon (Settings) > Mapping" and check the "Locale fields" section:

If that is correct, make sure you only use the general name of the field in your recommendation display's personalization, so in your example that would be %%product_url%%, which should be available via the "Add an Identifier"-dropdown:

Then in the email where you add the HTML code, you copied from the logic that uses your display, you need to add ?locale=sv-se at the end of the Link-URL as well as the Image-URL:

<a href=https://MID.recs.igodigital.com/rr/v2/hash/1/l/EMAIL?locale=fr-fr”>
   <img src=https://MID.recs.igodigital.com/rr/v2/hash/i/1/EMAIL?locale=fr-fr” />
</a>

The documentation also states, that the parameter should be all lowercase:

TIP Use all lowercase for locale= values in email recommendations.

Sometimes there is a problem with updating a display, so it might be a good idea to create a new display, paste your current code and start image creation. Then use the new display in your logic.

EDIT: In a recent implementation I figured out that even tough there is a mapping which can be defined and the documentation isn't clear about this, localization only reliably works if the exact same names (case sensitive) as in the documentation are used. So for example locale_en-uk_Productname doesn't work, but locale_en-uk_ProductName works fine.

Here you can find the names for all the standard fields:

SkuID|ProductCode|ProductName|locale_fr-FR_ProductName|locale_en-US_ProductName|Keywords|ProductLink|locale_fr-FR_ProductLink|locale_en-US_ProductLink|ImageLink|RegularPrice|SalePrice|OnlineAvailability|RegularPriceDisplay|locale_fr-FR_RegularPriceDisplay|locale_en-US_RegularPriceDisplay|SalePriceDisplay|locale_fr-FR_SalePriceDisplay|locale_en-US_SalePriceDisplay

(Source: Localized Recommendations)

Related documentation:

• Localized Recommendations

Answer 2

Update; We fixed it by copying the exact Einstein attribute names as our column names in the productfeed. Also you need both the Display prices in String datatype and the non-Display prices in float datatype.