One of the first steps in building a successful, personalized relationship with consumers is to establish shopping preferences and infer shopper intent. These relationships can be inferred by intelligently examining brand shoppers’ aggregate shopping practices while preserving shopper privacy.

However, to reach that point where you can examine their behavior, you need to gather data on what they’re actually doing in your commerce store, on the searches they perform, and how they navigate your site —all the signals regarding their behavior that shoppers leave on their journey.

With Empathy, these signals are captured unobtrusively during the tagging process to provide a truly anonymized yet tailored, contextual experience for shoppers. Tagging is the foundation for insights and analytics, and advanced search & discovery features such as contextual search.

To get started with Empathy Platform, first you need to implement tagging:

1. Understand the tagging process

2. Prepare for tagging

3. Track shopper interactions

4. Integrate tagging in your commerce store

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If you want to use contextual search features and establish a baseline to measure search performance, start collecting data from your current search engine (e.g. most searched terms, clicks, etc.) before implementing Empathy Platform search.

Understand the tagging process

Tagging involves adding snippets of code to your site to track specific shopper interactions. There are multiple benefits to using tagging:

• Offer advanced search experiences in your store.
• Get interaction analytics such as CTR, findability, and check-out ratio.
• Build highly relevant, unique and personalized results based on user affinities, user preferred categories, and last viewed and last purchased products.
• Collect data so you can infer search intent patterns for each query by analyzing collective behavior.
• Track users-on-page behavior to detect patterns and generate relevant products and content for future visitors.

Curious to learn more? See Understand how tagging works and why it matters.

Prepare for tagging

When preparing your commerce store for tagging, you need to think about what search features you want to use, what interactions you want to collect, and what information you want to be able to analyze and track before integrating in your application.

To get ready for tagging, see Prepare to capture shopper interaction.

Track shopper interactions

Once you understand why you need tagging and what information you want to track, you need to identify the types of interactions that best suit your requirements and the events you need to track these interactions.

To learn more about the events you can use for tracking, see Track shopper interactions in your store.

Integrate tagging in your commerce store

You can integrate with the Tagging microservices using the Tagging REST API.

For more information, see Capture interaction using the Tagging API.

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If you are using the Empathy Platform Interface X frontend, you should add the tagging events when you build your interface.

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Check out the Tagging API reference for a complete reference documentation.