Every user interaction within a site or app signals the user’s interests, preferences and intent such as adding to cart, filtering a list, viewing an item, and making a purchase. The products they interact with, particularly their attributes (color, a particular brand, a style) and attribute values (red, Nike, Tshirt) teach us about their preferences.
Combining product attributes with interaction types while taking into account the recency of the interaction, allows us to identify user preferences overall and in real-time.
Our Affinity based audience condition provides you with the tools to leverage the user’s affinity and create highly personalized experiences based on their personal preferences.
Once these audiences are created, they can be used for targeting and to export the audiences to third party platforms.
Building a User Affinity Profile
We start by building a user affinity profile. At the user level, for each interaction type, we collect and aggregate all the product attribute values that the user interacted with. We then calculate an affinity score for each attribute value. The score sums up the total interactions for each value, favoring recent interactions and high intent interaction types by giving more weight to real-time activities, purchases, and add to cart.
Individual user scores are normalized, using the entire site’s traffic as a baseline. That is, if a particular attribute value generally receives high scores (e.g milk and eggs are popular items at the grocery store), it will not skew results.
Creating Audiences Using the Affinity Condition
When defining an Affinity based audience, begin by selecting the desired attribute (color, category, brand, gender, etc) and its respective value (red, dresses, Donna Karan, women). You can define the level of user affinity from ‘highest’ to ‘within the top 10’ to determine how inclusive or exclusive you prefer your segment to be.
For example, when you want to promote content based on top-level categories, such as a homepage banner for either women, men, or kids, set the affinity level to ‘highest’ and create an experience for each. Most often, users will have a distinguished preference for only one of these categories.
However, when you have dozens of values such as the case with brands, but only a handful of available promotions, widen your affinity level beyond ‘highest’. You might not ‘hit’ everyone’s most favorite brand, but you will still be within their preferences and the segment size will be significant.
Learn more about Audience creation.
Notes & Limitations
- Affinity is based on your product feed. Only attributes with discrete values (closed list) can be leveraged for the affinity condition.
- By default, we provide the ‘category’ and its values, as an out of the box attribute. Additional attributes must be manually allowed or included by a Dynamic Yield admin for each site individually.
- Affinity data is generated per user after a minimum of 5 pageviews (category or product pages) or one other product interaction such as Add to Cart or Purchase.
- Affinity is available for eCommerce sites. If are interested in enabling this feature, contact your Customer Success Manager.