Personalization Engine Meta Tags

Tags on your content items are required for the Personalization Engine to be able to measure individual user interests. While you can submit tags for each item from your external system using the Content API, many clients choose to instead use meta tags in the HTML of each of their site's content pages, which the system can ingest. Either way, these tags then live on each content item in your Content Library.

Meta tags are placed within the <head> tag of your web pages. You can use a a system-specific meta tag, a generic meta tag (one that you might have in place already), or an Open Graph tag (og:). In this list, if multiple are included in your code, the former overrides the latter. For example, if you have Engage by Sailthru-specific tags and og: tags, only the Engage by Sailthru tags are pulled. In addition to tracking user interests, once tags are present on your content items, they can be used to set up content feeds. You could send a newsletter with customized content for each subscriber, and also tailored based on the tags you choose to include in the feed. For example, use a feed of "sports"-tagged content, but then allow the system to tailor the list to the user's favorite teams based on their interests.

Format 

    • All sailthru.tags are automatically converted to dashed-lowercase-format for consistency.
    • Meta tags may not be longer than 32 characters.
    • Meta tags may not be solely numbers (e.g. "5" or "25). These will be ignored and not added to the user's profile. Tag values should instead be "price 25-50" or "size 5."
    • Keyword tags, also known as sailthru.tags (interest tags saved to the user profile), are restricted to the set of characters a-z, 0-9, and hyphen.
    • Meta tags, such as title or description (e.g. spidered and added to the content collection), may be either UTF-8 or ISO-8859-1.
    • Use single quotation marks within a tag's content
      • Do This:
        <meta name="sailthru.title" content="The Sad Irony of Obama's 'Big' Foreign-Policy Speech"/>
      • Not This:<meta name="sailthru.title" content="The Sad Irony of Obama's "Big" Foreign-Policy Speech"/>

Type

Differentiate user interests or preferences:

  • Topics or categories
  • Type of content
  • Brands
  • Price ranges
  • Sizes
  • Style preferences

 

Content

  • Make tags short. Distinguish between types. For example: color-red versus brand-red.
  • Don't be too specific or general:
    • Avoid tags that are so broad that they do not reveal anything about user interests. shirtsis not a good tag; mens-dress-shirtsis better.
    • Avoid tags that are so specific that they will never reoccur in the future.
    • There is no limit to the number of tags you may use across your Content Library, but feed generation and personalization will only make use of the 10,000 most-common tags.
  • Ideally, you should be able to re-use tags and categories that are already in your CMS.
  • Around five tags is good quantity for a piece of content or product.

Meta Tags

sailthru.tags / keywords

For categorization and user interest tracking. Comma-separated. These appear on user profiles. Possible HTML tags (listed highest priority to lowest):

  • <meta name="sailthru.tags" content="sports,red-sox" />
  • <meta name="keywords" content="sports,red-sox" />

Note: Facebook's Open Graph tags cannot be used for interest tagging (e.g. "og:tags" or "og:keywords" are not valid meta tags)

author

Contains the name of the author of the piece of content. Possible HTML tags:

  • <meta name="sailthru.author" content="Dustin Pedroia" />

date

The original date of the content. This is required for accuracy of the "Hours Back" Setting. Click here for acceptable formats. Possible HTML tags (listed highest priority to lowest)

  • <meta name="sailthru.date" content="2012-06-01 10:05:00" />
  • <meta name="date" content="2012-06-01 10:05:00" />
  • <meta name="dc.date.issued" content="2012-06-01 10:05:00" />
  • <meta name="dc.date" content="2012-06-01 10:05:00" />

expiration date

: Flash sales, events and some news stories should not be recommended after a certain date and time. Use this Engage by Sailthru-specific meta tag to prevent Personalization Engine from suggesting the content at the given point in time. Click here for acceptable date formats, such as 2013-05-07T00:01Z or Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:38:36 -0500. Possible HTML tags:

  • <meta name="sailthru.expire_date" content="Mon, 07 Jan 2013 11:38:36 -0500" />

description

Contains a short summary of the piece of content. Note that reporting is based on keyword tags, not description tags. Description can be pulled into a template as part of a Personalization Engine data feed. Possible HTML tags (listed highest priority to lowest):

  • <meta name="sailthru.description" content="An example description goes here" />
  • <meta name="og:description" content="An example description goes here" />
  • <meta name="description" content="An example description goes here" />

image.full

Contains a URL to the full version of the image for the piece of content. Possible HTML tags:

  • <meta name="sailthru.image.full" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" /><span id="cke_bm_192E"> </span><span id="cke_bm_193E"> </span>

Note: It's required you use absolute image paths when passing image.full or image.thumb. Relative paths may break the image shown in your content library.

image.thumb

A URL to a small (50x50 recommended) thumbnail for the piece of content. Personalization Engine supports two image tags. The thumbnail can be pulled into Concierge. Possible HTML tags (listed highest priority to lowest):

  • <meta name="sailthru.image.thumb" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
  • <meta name="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg" />
  • <link rel="image_src" href="http://example.com/image.jpg" />

Note: It's required you use absolute image paths when passing image.full or image.thumb. Relative paths may break the image shown in your content library.

title

The user-facing title of the piece of content. Title tag will be passed into Concierge. Possible HTML tags (listed highest priority to lowest):

  • <meta name="sailthru.title" content="Example Title" />
  • <meta name="og:title" content="Example Title" />
  • <title>Example Title</title>

sailthru.location

  • <meta name="sailthru.location" content="40.697299,-74.003906" />

The location of a piece of content.

price

  Pass the price (in cents) as a meta tag: Price must be passed in cents (shown in the below example):

  • <meta name="sailthru.price" content="17100" />