The core of the Marfeel Recommender revolves around a set of interconnected features that work together to provide highly personalized and engaging content recommendations. These core concepts include feeds and recommendation engines, which determine the articles suggested to users, as well as content restrictions and curations, which offer editors significant control over what is displayed. Additionally, visual presentation, targeting strategies, and the creation of tailored experiences ensure that the recommender seamlessly integrates into your site and effectively caters to different user segments.
1. Feeds and Recommendation Engines
At the core of the Marfeel Recommender are feeds and engines. Feeds are sources of content that can be either internal, leveraging Marfeel’s own supported recommendation engines, or remote—pulling content from external Marfeel accounts you decide to connect to. These recommendations engines can deliver different types of content such as the latest articles, the most popular posts, trending topics, similar articles, personalized content, or those with the highest CTR. By combining multiple feeds, you can mix content in a strategic way, giving different feeds specific weights to ensure the perfect blend of recommended material.
For instance, you might combine content from your site with trending stories from a partner site or highlight both the most popular and the newest articles. The power lies in how these feeds are blended, providing flexibility in how content appears to users.
2. Content Restrictions
The Marfeel Recommender uses content restrictions to control what is recommended to users. These restrictions can be set to align with user behavior—such as recommending similar articles when a user is reading about a specific topic. You can also define editorial constraints, such as ensuring recommendations come only from specific sections, authors, certain sites, specific tags, or other criteria.
3. Content Curations
Content curations provide editors with even more control. Curations allow editors to manually select specific pieces of content to feature within specific recommendation modules. This human touch means you can prioritize specific articles that align with editorial goals, upcoming events, or specific campaigns.
Curations also include properties such as scheduling and targeting. Targeting allows editors to determine in which articles the curated content should appear. For example, a curation can be set to display when a user is reading an article about a particular topic or within a certain section.
Articles can be set to appear only at specific times or for fixed durations. For example, a curated piece might appear tomorrow for 48 hours and, if it performs well, continue being recommended by the underlying engine.
There is also a feature called performance safeguard (stop-loss), which prevents curated content from underperforming by replacing it if it falls below an acceptable CTR threshold, defined as the average CTR of the articles in the recommender.
Content curations also include features like headline adjustments that allow editors to tweak the presentation of a content, making it more compelling to readers and potentially increasing its click-through rate.
4. Content Exclusions
Content exclusions allow editors to editorially guarantee that a given article will not be displayed by algorithmic recommendations. This ensures that certain pieces of content—whether due to timing, sensitivity, or editorial judgment—are kept out of the recommendation pool. By applying exclusions, you can maintain better control over the brand voice, protect sensitive content, or fulfill specific editorial criteria that go beyond simple restriction rules. Read more.
5. Visual Presentation
The Marfeel Recommender is designed to be easy to integrate and fit seamlessly within the overall layout and user flow of your site. Using the Experience Manager, you can add via no-code the recommender module within your HTML, allowing you to dictate exactly where recommendations will appear on the page. This flexibility lets you optimize where and how recommendations are presented involving several possible formats:
- Inline: Recommendations can be embedded inline directly into the content or page content.
- Pop-up: Content can appear as a pop-up to capture user attention when they’re most engaged.
- Flowcard: This format presents recommendations as fluid, card-like elements that users can scroll through effortlessly.
6. Targeting
Targeting enables editors to define precisely where Marfeel Recommender modules should appear, based on specific criteria. For example, Marfeel Recommender modules can be set to display when users are reading articles about particular topics, within specific sections, targeting loyal and lover users, specific segments of users from the DMP, subscribers, users that are on their first page view, users reading evergreen content, or users coming from social platforms. This ensures that the Recommender Module is always contextually relevant to the user’s current activity.
7. Experiences
An experience within Marfeel is the combination of the recommender, its feeds, its visual presentation format, and the targeting strategy. Experiences are targeted to specific user segments, enabling tailored content delivery based on criteria such as browsing behavior, referral source, or content engagement history. This approach ensures that users see the most relevant recommendations, maximizing engagement and content discovery.
8. User Roles
The Marfeel Recommender operates with two distinct user profiles, each with specific responsibilities to ensure smooth setup and operation:
8.1. Experience Manager, Product Manager or Tool Admin
The Administrator is responsible for the initial setup of the Marfeel Recommender. Using the Experience Manager, they configure the core aspects of the recommender, including:
- Selecting and connecting the appropriate feeds.
- Defining the recommendation engines to be used (e.g., trending, popular, personalized).
- Setting targeting rules to ensure the right content reaches the right audience.
- Configuring the visual presentation formats (e.g., inline, pop-up, flowcard).
Once these elements are configured, the recommender is ready for use, and no further administrative intervention is needed unless the setup requires adjustments.
8.2. Editor
Once the recommender is live, the responsibility shifts to the editorial team. Editors can:
- Use content curations to manually highlight specific articles.
- Apply timing and targeting rules to curated articles (e.g., showing specific content in certain sections or to specific user segments).
- Monitor performance metrics and adjust curated content to maintain high engagement.
This division of responsibilities ensures that the setup remains consistent and scalable while giving editors the flexibility to adapt content dynamically.
9. Conclusions
The Marfeel Recommender is a versatile and powerful tool that can significantly boost user engagement and recirculation by providing personalized recommendations that users have not seen before. By leveraging recommendation engines, automated remote content feeds, editorial curations, strategic targeting, visual presentation formats, and well-defined experiences, you can ensure that the recommended articles are always fresh, relevant, and engaging for different segments of your audience.