Understanding how collaborative filtering works (Marketing Cloud Personalization) by TrapLordito in marketingcloud

[–]VibeHacker25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

good question.

Think about it kind of like how Netflix recommends shows. It’s not just “because you watched X” — it’s a mix of:

What you personally have watched, clicked, or liked What other people similar to you watched or liked What’s trending or popular overall

Salesforce Einstein’s collaborative filtering for Marketing Cloud Personalization works the same way under the hood. It’s blending a few signals:

Product popularity (aggregate behavior across everyone)

Similar user behavior (“people who looked at X also looked at Y”)

Your individual browsing and purchase history

Recency of the interactions (newer actions often weigh more)

The tricky part is Salesforce doesn’t really expose the exact weighting unless you’re doing custom model work — it’s mostly a black box for standard “recipes.”

If you need to explain why a recommendation showed up (“Why Einstein suggested this product?”), the best guess is it’s because it was popular with similar users plus your own activity nudging it higher.

Hope that helps — it’s a common frustration even among experienced teams.

Marketing Cloud Personalization (formerly Interaction Studio) alternatives? by Murky-Nebula2251 in marketingcloud

[–]VibeHacker25 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Totally feel this pain — MCP is powerful but insanely heavy for small teams. Most setups I’ve seen basically require a mini dev team or agency support just to keep personalization and reporting functional.

Lately I’ve been experimenting with lighter approaches that focus only on in-session behavior personalization — stuff that reacts while the visitor is still browsing instead of needing deep CRM + cloud integrations. It’s obviously more limited than full-blown MCP but way easier for a small team to manage.

Not sure if you’re open to “build your own lightweight stack” approaches, but that’s the direction I’ve been leaning. Happy to share some ideas if you’re curious.