Insights: The Next Level of Analytics in Recombee UI

What is our new feature Insights about?

• Insights elevates Recombee capabilities by incorporating advanced real-time analytics into its Admin UI.
• It reveals how users interact with recommendations and your platform, offering transparent and close monitoring of the recommender's behavior, user engagement details, and organic interactions.
• It enables easy creation of various visualizations and report types, from stacked to line charts and tables, with agile data slicing, selective filtering, and compound metrics calculation.
• Our curated library of visualizations, crafted for the most common analytical use cases, offers immediate application with the flexibility for adjustments and further exploration.
• In synergy with Recombee's robust customization capabilities, Insights provides targeted control over your unique KPIs, enabling informed, strategic decisions.

At Recombee, we understand that a great recommender engine today extends beyond merely optimizing metrics such as click-through rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR).

While these metrics are crucial and our engine aims to uplift them, it's essential that the recommended content aligns with our customers' product visions and editorial teams' goals, while also adhering to their unique KPIs.

And these KPIs can often be more complex than just CTR and CR.

To help our customers follow their product strategies, we've introduced several features that allow for the customization of recommendations within different parts of their web or app.

Among these features are the ability to customize the recommendation model's behavior, select which content to recommend or boost (either through predefined rules or our flexible query language, ReQL), and our latest addition, Item Segmentations.

However, until now, assessing the impact of these business rules, especially concerning custom KPIs, has been challenging. Many of our customers have had questions like:

• Is the current boosting of my VoD platform’s original content sufficient to reach most users?
• How has boosting by margin changed the distribution of recommended brands?
• And which content pieces or products are actually getting the most clicks in individual recommendation boxes?

Our newest feature called Insights has an answer to all these questions.

Introducing Insights

Insights is a new analytics section within the Recombee Admin UI.

Library of Predefined Insights

The Insights feature comes with a library of predefined visualizations, providing a straightforward way to understand the tool and its capabilities.

These predefined Insights can answer many questions, such as:

• What are the most recommended items in the individual places where you show recommendations?
• What categories do the recommended items belong to?
• or How is the generated revenue from recommendations distributed among your affiliate partners?

All the Insights are updated in near real-time, taking new recommendations and interactions into account in less than a second.

We believe these predefined Insights will be of great help to many of our customers.

However, at the same time, we know that your questions about the distribution of recommended and interacted items can be complex and unique, and no library of predefined visualizations can fully address them all.

That's why we have spent a tremendous amount of designing and engineering time to come up with a tool that is both user-friendly and versatile enough to handle your unique queries.

Custom Insights

To create a custom insight, begin by either editing an existing Insight from the library or creating a new one from scratch. In that case, you need to first choose its type - from various chart types to tables for more complex reports - and then configure:

Data that shall be presented

You can choose from a wide variety of data sources and associated metrics, e.g.:

• number of recommended items,
• number of interactions based on recommendations,
• number of interactions in general,
• number of interacting users,
• generated profit,
• watched portions of videos,
• …and much more.

Filters on these data

You may want to go into more detail and look at the data only for:

• a specific recommendation box (Scenario),
• a specific category (or any other property that you have specified in your Items catalog),
• or even for a particular Item or User

Splits

You can break down the data by various fields revealing the top:

• scenarios,
• categories,
• affiliate partners,
• brands,
• and much more…

The combination of Data Sources, Filters, and Splits is pretty powerful.

For instance, the following figure shows the profit generated by out clicks (Data Source) from the recommendations box on product detail (Filter on a Scenario) per affiliate partner (Split):

You can also look into the ratio metrics, such as what is the share of each category on all the views:

And if you want to examine multiple metrics simultaneously, you can create a table report such as this one:

Have these examples piqued your interest? Check out our tutorial video to see these configurations in action.

Conclusion

Insights, the analytics section of our Admin UI, offers various predefined and fully customizable reports to track recommended items and how users interact with these recommendations.

In Recombee, we are particularly excited about the configurability of Insights and believe you will love it too.

The feature is now in public Beta, available to all our customers in the US and Europe.

Want to see Insights in action? Get your free trial here!