Targeting and Personalization

Targeting and personalization is the processes of delivering personalized content to one or more users, or to any other business entity that has a profile. For example, if you are running a sports Web site, you may want to deliver tennis-related information only to tennis players, or to users who are interested in tennis. You may want to deliver announcements about upcoming tennis tournaments, or advertisements and promotions for tennis products.

You can use Commerce Server 2000 to perform two types of targeting:

Both expression-based targeting and prediction improve your ability to deliver content that may be of interest to the users who receive it. Users are more likely to return to your site when they can expect to receive a personalized experience.

Using Targeting Methods in Web Site Management

Expression-based Targeting

The Expression Builder

Processing Expressions

Using Targeting Methods in Web Site Management

You can target content to any business-related item that has a profile. For example, you can target content to anonymous users, registered users, companies, or contexts. For conceptual information about profiles, see Profiles.

You use Business Desk to target content to business-related items. For example, you can do the following:

Expression-based Targeting

Expression-based targeting is the process of creating expressions that define the users or context you want to target and the content you want to deliver. An expression is a condition that is evaluated against profiles to determine whether to deliver content, or perform another action. For example, an expression might be user.totalvisit > 100. If this expression evaluates to "True," then a specific piece of content is displayed to the user.

You use the Campaigns modules in Business Desk to create expressions, and then combine the expressions with the action you want to perform after the expression is evaluated. You can create two types of expressions:

After you have created target expressions, you can combine them to form a target group. A target group is a collection of expressions and actions. For example, you might create one expression to show a specific piece of content to users who have visited the site 10 times, and another expression to show content to users who have purchased a soccer shirt. You can combine the two expressions in a target group with AND or OR statements. For example:

If the user has visited the site 10 times AND the user has purchased a soccer shirt,

Display an advertisement for a soccer product.

In a target group you combine expressions by specifying the action to be taken when each expression evaluates to "True." Each action has two multipliers: a multiplier to apply if the expression is true, and a multiplier to apply if the expression is false. When the multiplier is applied, the expression is given a score, which affects whether the content is eligible for delivery. You can specify the following actions:

A site developer can change the values of the multipliers provided with Commerce Server. You may want to do this to give expressions with one action type a higher priority than expressions with a different action type.

The Expression Builder

The Commerce Server feature that enables business managers to create, edit, and view expressions is called the Expression Builder. The Expression Builder provides the user interface for building expressions. It accesses the appropriate properties for building an expression, and it names and stores the expression in the Commerce Server databases.

The Expression Builder is designed so that site developers can easily embed its functionality and user interface in other Business Desk modules. In addition, it can be invoked by any Web application that uses and manipulates expressions, enabling you to integrate it with other processes. For example, if you have an existing content management process, you can incorporate Expression Builder functionality, and then target content to users.

To create applications that use the Expression Builder, you do the following:

The Expression Builder uses Dynamic Hypertext Markup Language (DHTML for its UI, so the style sheets of the application will apply to the Expression Builder UI, giving your application a consistent look and feel.

Processing Expressions

Commerce Server performs several steps to specify the piece of content that is to be shown to a user. The following components are used in the process:

The following figure illustrates how target expressions, catalog expressions, user data and context data are input into the Expression Evaluator, which results in True, False, or undefined results. The result is input to CSF, which then determines the action to perform.

A figure that shows how target expressions, catalog expression, user and context data are put into the Expression Evalulator.
Target expression
Catalog expression
User data

Context data
Expression Evaluator
True, False, or undefined result
Content Selection Framework
Determines the action on this result


See Also

Profiles

Creating a Target Expression

Creating a Target Group

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