As part of our continued efforts to make refining by product categories within Actions easier, we updated several Actions audience filters to include refinements on products, product categories, and the product category hierarchy. The product category hierarchy means that you no longer have to explicitly list every product category you would like to refine by. Where previously an Actions user who wanted to refine by Men’s products needed to include in the refinement: ‘Men’s tops knit’, ‘Men’s bottoms jeans’, ‘Men’s socks’, etc., now you need only to enter ‘Men’s’ and Actions will automatically traverse the product category hierarchy to grab and include every descendant category. The audience filters affected are:

• Placed first transaction
• Placed last transaction
• Customers who spent certain amount in a timeframe
• Made a Number of Transactions in a Timeframe
• Purchased a Number of Products

While this effort makes including descendent categories significantly easier than before (you now only need to select one parent instead of all descendants), it does slightly complicate excluding descendent categories. To exclude a product category, please exclude the category on “product category hierarchy” instead of “product category”. If you exclude product categories on product category, then Actions will still traverse down the product category tree from a different parent (or grand parent) to grab the descendant category. Today’s behavior is now reversed from before, where excluding a single category does not exclude its descendant categories. You have to explicitly list every descendant category that you want to exclude. In summary, include categories using “”product category”” and exclude categories using “”product category hierarchy””. We hope to visualize the product category tree in the future so that including and excluding product categories is less confusing and easier to accomplish.