Catalog Overview

When sending messages to your users (using any medium), it's almost always necessary to include information about your organization's products, places, events, or services. With Catalog, you can store this information directly in Iterable and use it to personalize the messages you send.

For each of their recipients, campaigns can use collections to search, at send time, the information stored in catalogs. Collections match users with catalog data based on their interests, preferences, locations, and historical activity—anything stored on their Iterable user profile.

Historically, this type of personalization at scale required your organization to host and maintain a set of web services that could be queried for each of a campaign's recipients. With catalogs, there's no additional infrastructure required: Iterable hosts the data and queries it while sending a campaign.

# In this article

# Using Catalog

Using Catalog details how Catalog works, describes how it relates to data feeds, and provides instructions for creating, viewing, and deleting catalogs.

# Catalog Items

Catalog Items provides an overview of how to add, update, and delete catalog data.

# Defining Data Types for Catalog Item Fields

Defining Data Types for Catalog Item Fields takes a look at how to set the data types (string, long, double, geo_location, object, date, or boolean) for the fields in a catalog item. Collections can only search data that has been given an explicit data type, making this a crucial step.

# Collections

Collections search catalogs, finding items relevant to static search criteria or the fields on a user's Iterable profile. Additionally, they have powerful capabilities such as geo location searches: finding catalog data associated with a location close to the user.

Collections describes how to use the Collection Builder to create and edit collections that find the precise catalog data needed by a campaign.

# Using Catalogs & Collections in Messages

Using Catalogs & Collections in Messages demonstrates how to reference the data stored in a catalog when sending messages with Iterable.

# Catalog Issues and Limitations

Catalogs, catalog items, and collections have various limitations and known issues, as listed in Catalog Limitations.

# Catalog APIs

For information about APIs that can be used to work with catalogs and catalog items, read the Catalog API documentation.

# Want to learn more?

For more information about some of the topics in this article, check out this Iterable Academy course. Iterable Academy is open to everyone — you don't need to be an Iterable customer!

• Introduction to Catalog and Collections