parcelLab Product Recommendations

Integrate product recommendations in your communications to provide a personalized experience for customers that drives traffic back to your online shop and offers the potential for repurchase.

Overview

You can display product recommendations in emails, on your Order Status page, and Returns Portal as part of your campaigns set in Campaign Manager. The parcelLab recommendation engine uses the article data that you send in order to display products based on the items in the basket that are most likely to be purchased together. When customers click a product image from the list of recommended items, they will be navigated to the specific product page.

If the relevant article information is not available to show related products, the recommendation will default to a series of items that are considered best sellers.

Key Benefits

By providing product recommendations in your communications, you can provide customers with relevant promotional content related to their interests and improve their experience with your brand.

With the product recommendation content block in Campaign Manager, you can choose to display up to 10 products to showcase items that are likely to be purchased together or are best sellers to enhance customer engagement and retention rates.

Configuring Product Recommendations

The following section describes the configuration required for product recommendations.

Customer Requirements

To integrate product recommendation in your communications, you need to provide the relevant article data to parcelLab as specified below.

Required

• articleNo

• articleName

• articleUrl

• articleImageUrl

• quantity

Optional

• articleCategory

• articlePrice

• size

• color

For more information, see our data model documentation.

You can then complete the following setup to add product recommendations to your communications in the Campaign Manager module in the App:

• Create your campaign and set the relevant details (for example: target audience and start and end dates) or edit an existing campaign.

• Select to add product recommendations for emails, your Order Status page, and/or your Returns Portal.

• Set a return threshold in order to exclude products with a higher return rate than this.

• Choose to display up to 10 product recommendations in the selected communication type.

• Select whether to display product recommendations at the top or bottom of the Order Status page or Returns Portal page.

• UTM parameters are automatically added to enable monitoring when specific products are clicked. If you have set up custom UTM parameters these will not be overridden and therefore you may not benefit from automatic tracking. In addition to our standard UTMs, the &utm_content is set to recommendation.

When product recommendations are configured in the Campaign Manager module in the App, recommended items will display in your communications for scheduled campaigns with no further setup required.

Tracking On-Site User Engagement in Google Analytics

When recommendations are shown on the Order Status page or within the Returns Portal, the GTAG fires upon click, sending a structured recommendation_click event directly to Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

This is required for accurate attribution, as the on-site traffic source will already be set by the UTMs at the point that traffic reaches the site, so any attribution for on-site recommendation clicks must be handled by Google’s GTAG.

The event is fired with the following parameters that can be used to analyze engagement with product recommendations.

Parameter	Description
item_id, item_name, and item_category	Identifies the product shown in the recommendation
position	The index of the product within the recommendation carousel or list
section	Where the click occurred (that is: order_status_page or returns_portal)
page_location and page_referrer	Standard GA context fields
ep.app_name	Always set to parcellab to identify the origin
ep.screen_name	Indicates the context (for example: track_and_trace for the Order Status page)
ep.content_type	Set to product_recommendation for all recommended product clicks
ep.content_id	The name or SKU of the clicked product

Customer Requirements

To track user engagement from using the Product Recommendations feature, you must meet the following requirements:

• Order Status page and/or Returns Portal embedded on your website

• GA4 configured for your website

Viewing Product Recommendation Clicks in GA4

To view the tracked events in GA4:

1. Log in to Google Analytics.

2. Navigate to Reports > Realtime overview.

3. In the Event count by Event name card, click on the recommendation_click event.

   

   From this view, you can see the event parameters that are sent with the event.

   

• Use the section parameter to distinguish between clicks on the Order Status page and Returns Portal

• Use the position parameter to analyze product ranking performance

• For deeper analysis, navigate to Explore > Free Form to build a custom report and visualize the following:

  • Top-performing products by click volume

  • Conversion correlation with recommendation clicks

  • Engagement by device, geography, or session source