Affinity Allocation is a new approach to content personalization. It reduces the effort required to set up a personalization campaign, and provides more users with a more personalized experience.
Just tag each content variation with the affinity values most relevant to the experience (say, Children, Shoes, Boots), and then the Dynamic Yield affinity-based personalization engine automatically allocates the optimal variation for each user based on their current, real-time preferences and affinity profile.
You don't have to manually set up any affinity-based targeting conditions, and because all targeting logic relies on the variation tagging, you no longer need to set up separate targeted experiences for every variation. Instead, all variations can be added to a single targeted experience, and are consolidated into a single report.
Affinity allocation in web and API campaigns
Note: If you're using a variation feed, you can set your allocation attributes in the feed and update your campaigns automatically upon sync. Learn more about using affinity allocation in your variation feed campaigns.
Affinity allocation is available for all campaign types, except for Visual Editor and Web Recommendations.
Select User Affinity as the allocation method after creating the variations in an experience:
You then need to select the affinity attribute to allocate by, and tag each variation with an affinity value.
In the campaign, affinity allocation creates a new targeting condition, which the user must match to be served the experience:
If users don't match the targeting condition created by the affinity attributes tagged in the variations, they aren't served this experience, and are evaluated for the next experience in line.
An experience with affinity as the allocation method can have additional targeting conditions, and it can be placed anywhere within the campaign. For example, in this case, only users who are not loyalty club members will be served variations by affinity:
Finally, if the campaign includes multiple slots, variations are served according to their affinity scores (the highest score is selected first, and so on).
Note: In Item List, Dynamic Content, and multi-variation Custom API campaigns, if there aren’t enough variations to be served to each user based on their current affinity profile, the remaining variations are selected based on the prevalence of the remaining tagged affinity values in the account.
Measuring Affinity Allocation overall experiences performance
As in Dynamic Allocation, we would like to measure the overall performance of experiences using Affinity Allocation, regardless of the variation served.
We recommend allocating some traffic to a control group that selects either a random variation or no action. This enables you to compare sessions served with a control group and the ones served with Affinity Allocation, measuring the impact of using Affinity vs. a control group in the Experience Reports.
For details about how to define a control group, see Using the Control Group.
Affinity allocation in Experience Email
In Experience Email, affinity allocation is assigned in the Dynamic Content block, where you can select to target by either affinity or audience:
You select an attribute to use for targeting. For example, product category, brand, or color.
You then define up to 5 keywords (tags) belonging to the attribute to use in the variation. For example, if you selected the attribute "category", you might use the tag "shoes", or if you selected the attribute "color", you might use the tag "red".
So, in essence, any user who has an affinity to the product attributes you select, sees the variation you created. In the illustration, the affinity is by category, and the category selected is cabinets or lamps or tables.
If a user doesn't have a score for each of the assigned tags, the affinity-based variation is not served, and the user sees the fallback defined for the block.
Frequently Asked Questions
Are there any prerequisites for using affinity allocation?
A product feed with attributes selected for affinity is required.
What happens if a user has only a very low affinity score for one of the variations?
The variation to which the user has affinity is served. As long as there is an affinity score, no matter what it is.
What happens if the user has an affinity for more than one value defined?
If the score for one value is higher, that variation is served. If the score is the same for more than one value, the variations are randomized.
Can a marketer tag one variation with multiple affinity values?
A variation can be tagged with multiple values (up to 5), and then we calculate the sum of the scores to decide what to serve.
Is there a limit on the number of variations that can be created for affinity allocation?
In Experience Email, up to 15 variations can be created. In API campaigns, up to 50.
Are all campaign types supported?
Recommendation campaigns have affinity strategies of their own, and are not compatible with affinity allocation.
What metrics are included in the experience report for experiences with affinity allocation, and how should I read them?
The traffic split between control and “test” is sticky per session. But as soon as a user is assigned to the “test”, there is no stickiness of the variations. Therefore, only impressions and clicks are valid metrics at the variation level. Purchases and revenue are not valid at this level, and should be considered only at the top level (control vs. affinity).
Does AffinityML work with affinity allocation?
Yes, it does! Learn more about how AffinityML works with your campaigns.