Tips & Tricks: Target by Temperature & Heat Up Personalized Content (Literally ☀️)

Date Sent: April 13th, 2021

Hi there,

As the Northern Hemisphere transitions to spring and the Southern Hemisphere transitions to autumn, this is an opportune time to consider geography and seasonal relevance as part of your Experience targeting methodology. Targeting Experiences to users based on the temperature, precipitation, or other weather-related conditions that are forecasted wherever users are located can be highly impactful. For example, in one use case study, a global retailer increased Revenue per session by 13.3% by serving a homepage banner to users with content aligned to their current outside temperature.

This approach to targeting can be an effective, scalable way for your team to serve timely and relatable content to users. As your team transitions to promoting warm-weather, seasonally-specific collections, sales, and recommendations, leverage our Experience Targeting use case ideas for inspiration on serving users with content that is personalized to their forecasted temperatures.

Use Case #1: Warm-Weather Recommendations Strategy Filter

As temperatures begin to rise, recommend products from the latest warm-weather seasonal collection to users that are located in areas where warmer temperatures are forecasted. If the product feed that's integrated with your DY admin has categories or keywords to denote products of seasonal collections, add a Custom Filter Rule to a relevant Recommendation Strategy to serve only those products. Apply a targeting condition to the Custom Filter Rule so that the rule only applies to users located in areas where the temperature is forecasted to be above a certain degree. In other words, the rule will only apply when a widget that uses the Strategy is served to users that have warmer temperatures in their forecast.

Custom Filter Rule Setup Overview

Create a new Recommendation Strategy or edit an existing Strategy that has the preferred Page Type and Algorithm already selected. Then, click the Add Filtering Rule link. Name the rule and add any relevant notes and labels, then specify the following settings on each tab of the Custom Filter Rule window:

1. Properties tab: for the Rule Type, select Only Include. For the "Apply to" setting, select All Slots.

2. Products tab: click the Select Column dropdown and select keywords or categories, depending on which property column is most appropriate to use given the structure of your team's product feed. For example, if your team's feed uses keywords to denote items belonging to the latest spring/summer collections, then your conditions on the Products tab may look similar to this:

3. Targeting tab: below the "Additional Targeting Conditions" portion of the Targeting tab, click the blank dropdown and select Weather. Using the additional dropdowns that will populate after you select Weather, define the temperature condition(s) that users who are exposed to widgets that leverage this Strategy must meet in order for the Custom Filter Rule to apply. For instance, if you'd like the rule to only apply to users that are located in areas where temperatures are forecasted above 60℉ or 15℃ for that day, your targeting conditions could be similar to the following:
4. Schedule tab: if you'd like to schedule a start time of when the rule will begin to apply to the Strategy or if you'd like the Rule to expire after a certain date, select the Custom option and define the specific date and time for the Start and/or End settings.

Once you're finished setting up the Custom Filter Rule, save the Rule and then save the Strategy. Moving forward, users who are exposed to a Variation of a widget that leverages that Strategy will be served with recommended products that only include items from the spring/summer collection if they are located in areas where the temperature is forecasted to be above 60℉ or 15℃ on that particular day. All other users will be served with the same item results they would've been served with if the rule had never been added to the Strategy.

Within a Recommendation campaign, you could also create an Experience targeted to users that meet those same temperature conditions to serve them with a Variation that uses this Strategy and has a relevant widget title. You could use messaging for the title that lets users know that the recommended products belong to the latest warm-weather seasonal collection:

Use Case #2: Temperature-Gauged Homepage Banner

Until the weather is consistently warmer for most regions where your users are typically located, align the content of a homepage banner Experience to promote the new spring/summer collection with the forecasted temperature of a given user's region. For instance, say your team already has an active Dynamic Content banner on the homepage of your site. Create an Experience within that campaign to promote those new warm-weather products and target it to users that are located in areas where the temperature is forecasted to be warmer than 60℉ or 15℃.

Campaign Setup Overview

Create a new Dynamic Content campaign or add an Experience to an existing Dynamic Content campaign. Target the Experience using conditions similar to the following:

Note: you may also apply any other relevant Audience targeting and/or session-based targeting conditions to the Experience that may be relevant to the objective(s) of the overall campaign.

For the Variation design, leverage a background image and messaging that aligns to the warm weather that is forecasted for that user's region. For instance, you could use the out-of-the-box (OOTB) Hero Banner template, select a background image that includes products from the latest warm-weather collection, and tailor the messaging accordingly. Your Variation for this temperature-targeted Experience could look something like this:

You could also use the OOTB Weather Forecast template to show the upcoming daily temperature forecast to users located in regions where warmer temperatures are expected. Whichever design template you choose to leverage, be sure to provide the Banner Click Through URL for the collection-specific Category page that you'd like users to land on when they click on the banner. For more details on Weather Targeting for Homepage banners, check out our Knowledge Base article on this topic here.

Until next time,
Ashley

Ashley Berman
Sr. Customer Education Manager