A recipe is a relationship between your Shopify theme sections, your content variations for each section, and the rules that display the right variation to the right customer.

A single customer segment recipe can display content variations in multiple sections at the same time. Combining and applying rules to the recipe ensure you trigger the right content variations to display, to the right customers, at the right time.

Each recipe is made up of three ingredients.

A recipe allows you to:

Give your recipe a unique name and description, then select "Create Recipe".

You’ve spent lots of time crafting the look and feel of your Shopify store. Once installed, Context scans your templates and turns each of your themes sections into areas of personalization. Each section is sorted by the template they’re applied to (ie. homepage, collections, etc.).

Your content variations display in tables, organized with your fallback section titles as headers for easy discoverability.

Content variations are one of the things that makes Context so powerful. Context offers the ability to create multiple variations of your content, based off the fallback versions in your theme.

Each of your variations can be triggered to display to your visitors with the use of powerful Context rules.

Start creating variations of your content by selecting the “+ Variation” button. Context instantly displays your fallback version with the full suite of editing properties.

Test new versions of your sections without having to write a single line of code. Simply select two or more variations in any section, across any of your templates and A/B testing is instantly enabled.

Learn more about A/B testing

Variations are shared across the same section types (ie. banners).

For example, if you have a “Hero Banner” section on your homepage template, and a “Hero Banner” section on your catalog page template, variations can be shared across the two sections because they’re both “Hero banners”.

Each of these banner sections may have different styles applied within your theme. While a banner created for your catalog page could display in the banner section on your homepage, you may not want it to based on the different styles applied to each section.

By default, Context only displays variations native to the section they’ve been created in. However, if you’d like to use a variation from another compatible section, turning on the “Include all toggle” will display the variations that are compatible.

Rules are the conditions by which the variations of content are displayed. You could display rain gear products to users when it’s raining, or display a call-to-action to users visiting from Toronto.

Rules ensure you deliver the right content to the right customers at the right time.

Learn more about Rules

The order of recipes on the dashboard is important to understand.

When a user visits your store, Context starts to evaluate which recipe applies to the current visitor. It’s possible that you may have multiple recipes that could trigger for a given user, so the order of those recipes becomes important.

Once Context finds the first recipe that matches the current visitor, it loads the content variations for that recipe.

In the image above there are three different recipes that display content to visitors from Toronto (ie. location-based rule).

However, the second two recipes have multiple rules applied. They’re combining location + weather to trigger the content variations to display.

Context evaluates recipes TOP to BOTTOM. This means that if the visitor is in Toronto, the first recipe in the image above would trigger and the associated content variations would display.

Providing customers with the right products and messaging at the right time is important. Given the current visitor in Toronto is experiencing a sunny day, we would want the third recipe to be triggered, displaying running gear for warm sunny days (more effective targeted marketing).

It would be more advantageous to move the “Running gear for visitors from Toronto” to the bottom of the list as Context would evaluate the rules from top to bottom, triggering recipe number two (ie. The visitor is in Toronto and the weather is warm).

If the weather didn’t match either of the first two recipes, the third recipe based solely on location (ie. Toronto) would trigger the associated content variations to display.

Select the ordering icons on the left side of each recipe and drag it into the most effective position.

Analytics are high-level metrics that allow you to gauge the success of your recipes.

Learn more about Analytics