Learn to do real-time behavioral targeting in SAS Intelligent Advertising for Publishers

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Real-time Behavioral Targeting

Behavioral targeting is the process of identifying and targeting visitors based on previous interactions or behaviors over a given time span. These behaviors include tags and values that are part of ad requests. By analyzing this history, flights can be targeted to visitors who meet certain behavioral criteria. For example, a visitor who has visited a page with ad requests containing "/AREA=SPORTS" three times in the past 30 days could be targeted. These behavioral "events" are recorded and analyzed in real time to enable a responsive experience for the visitor.

The configuration of real-time behavioral targeting utilizes the Events feature and, optionally, the Supertags feature, both part of the Targets section in the user interface.

Events

An event is the occurrence of a specified visitor action. The event is associated with a timestamp. It can be recorded using the SETSV directive, predefined in uploaded data, or used with targets. See the Advanced Features guide for more information on events.

For real-time behavioral targeting, events are typically used with defined targets. An occurrence of the event is recorded when a visitor’s ad request matches the assigned target. This occurs for impression requests only.

Events are configured through these fields:

• Name – Specifies the name of the event to be used with targeting, with the SETSV directive, or with uploaded data.
• Max Count – Specifies the maximum number of event occurrences that should be recorded. If the maximum number is exceeded, the number of occurrences remains at the maximum value defined.
• Max Age – Specifies the maximum age of event occurrences. Event occurrences that are outside of the defined age value will be discarded. Unless specified, the default time unit for any value entered is seconds. Units of "seconds," "minutes," "hours," "days," and "years" can be used. For example, "30 days" or "1 month" are both valid values.
• Target – Specifies a target of tags and values that, when matched on an ad request, will cause an event occurrence to increment for the visitor.

Once an event is created and has a target specified, the event will immediately begin recording event occurrences.

Targeting Events

A target can be created containing an event. When adding an event to a target rule, choose the event, select an operator, and then click to edit in the right value field. A popup dialog will appear with several options:

• Occurrences – Specifies the number of occurrences that should be targeted. When using an operator like Greater Than or Less Than, the value in the field indicates the minimum or maximum number of occurrences respectively.
• Select Another Event – Allows the selection of another event that will be required to have occurred for the visitor.
• Dates
  • Relative Dates – Specifies dates relative to the current date. For example, a start date of "14 days" and an end date of "7 days" would target event occurrences for the previous week.
  • Absolute Dates – Specifies the explicit start and end date range of the event occurrences that the target should match.
  • Any Dates – Allows any date for an event occurrence to match, provided it does not exceed the Max Age value defined for the event itself.
  • Session – Specifies events that occur during a visitor’s session, which is typically active for 30 minutes from the visitor’s last request.

For example, the following targeting rule indicates that this target will only match if the visitor has more than six occurrences of the event "AddedToShoppingCart."

 

Extended Functionality for Events

Events by themselves cannot be logged for reporting or added to simulations. To accomplish this, the Supertags feature can be used in conjunction with events and targets to enable behavioral targeting events to be "linked" to traditional tag and value combinations. See the Advanced Features guide for more information on Supertags.

Supertags operate as a type of alias for a defined path info string. For example, a supertag named "abc" could be an alias for a path info string of "/site=foo/area=bar." When "/supertag=abc" is included in an ad request, the path info used for evaluation would include the expanded supertag path info of "/site=foo/area=bar."

Supertags, when configured for use with real-time behavioral targeting, should include the following:

• Value – Specifies the alias for the supertag value (e.g., /supertag=<value>). In this application, the supertag value won’t necessarily be used in ad calls because a target will be defined for the supertag (see Target below).
• Path info – This value should contain all the tags and values that correspond to the event. For example, if an event was created to record occurrences when items are added to a shopping cart, the corresponding tag and value might be "BT_AddedToShoppingCart=frequent." "BT_AddedToShoppingCart" would need to exist as a tag, with "frequent" as one of the values.
• Target – A target should be defined to include a target rule for the event. For example, the target rule might be "EVENT.AddedToShoppingCart Greater Than 3."

Similar to targets defined in an event, when an ad request matches a target defined for a supertag, the supertag path info is automatically added to the path info evaluation. With the above example, if a visitor had more than three occurrences of the "AddedToShoppingCart" event, the visitor’s ad request path info would automatically include "/BT_AddedToShoppingCart=frequent."

Because supertags utilize traditional tags, these tags can be added to BI reporting and simulation. This provides the ability to report on historical delivery data associated with the tags, and perform inventory projections on the tags.