Visitor Profiles in Adobe Target

What is Visitor profiles in Adobe Target?

Visitor profile contains information about how your website visitors interact with site pages and other optimized content if you are using a target with other adobe marketing suite solutions

Target profile information is stored in a single first-party cookie, this configuration can be changed to serve third-party cookie as well.

Visitor profile lifetime

By default, a visitor profile expires after 14 days of inactivity for that visitor. This profile lifetime can be extended.

For Extending profile lifetime yo can contact client care or your Adobe consultant. The lifetime can be set to as many as 90 days.

You do not need to download a new at.js file if your profile is extended beyond the default.

If your profile is extended beyond the 14-day default, you must download a new mbox.js file after your consultant or Client Care changes your settings. The cookie extension to support the changed profile lifetime is included in the updated mbox.js file. After you start using the new library, your visitors' profile lifetimes will update.

Profile Attributes Adobe Target

Profile attributes are parameters that are specific to a visitor. These attributes are stored in the visitor's profile to provide information about the visitor that can be used in your activities.

As a visitor browses your website, or when the visitor returns for another session, the saved profile attributes can be used to target content or log information for segment filtering.

To set up profile attributes, click Audiences > Profile Scripts.

For more information on Profile Script read Profile scripts in Adobe Target

Customer attributes in Adobe Target

Information about using enterprise customer data from customer relationship management (CRM) databases for content targeting in Adobe Target by using Customer Attributes in the Adobe Profiles & Audiences core service.

Enterprise customer data collected through multiple sources and stored inside a CRM database can be used in Target to strategically deliver the most relevant content to customers, specifically focusing on returning customers. The People core service (formerly Profiles and Audiences) brings together data collection and analysis with testing and optimization, making data and insights actionable.

For more information on Customer attributes read Customer attributes in Adobe Target

Category Affinity in Adobe Target

The category affinity feature automatically captures the categories a user visits and then calculates the user's affinity for the category so it can be targeted and segmented on. This helps to ensure that content is targeted to visitors who are most likely to interact on that information.

How to pass category affinity information into Target?

Whenever a user visits your site, profile parameters specific to the visitor are recorded in the Target database. This data is tied to the user's cookie.

One particularly useful parameter is user.categoryId , an mbox parameter assigned on a product page. As the visitor continues to browse, or returns for another session, the categories of products a particular user views can be recorded.

You can also record category information by passing it as the mbox parameter user.categoryId in any mbox (including a nested mbox), as a URL parameter user.categoryId , or in Target page parameters with a global mbox. See your account representative for more details.

Separate categories with a comma to include an item in multiple categories.

For example:

user.categoryId=clothing, shoes, Nike, running, Nike clothing, Nike shoes, Nike running shoes

Based on the frequency and recency of visits to your product categories, the category affinity (if any) a user has is recorded. Category affinity can be used to target populations for your activities.

You can use user.categoryAffinities[] in a profile script to return an array of the affinities that a visitor has populated.

The user.categoryId attribute used for Adobe Target's category affinity algorithm is distinct from the entity.categoryId attribute used for Adobe Target Recommendations' product and content recommendations. user.categoryId is required to track a user's favorite category. entity.categoryId is required to base recommendations on the current page's or current item's category. Pass both values to Adobe Target if you want to use both capabilities.

Category affinity algorithm

The category affinity algorithm works as follows:

10 points for the first category viewed
5 points for each category clicked after the first
When a new category is clicked, 1 is subtracted from all previously clicked categories
If a category was already clicked (seen), clicking it again won't subtract 1 from all other categories
If a sixth new category is clicked, the lowest scored category of the first five categories is dropped from the calculation
At the end of the session, divide all values by 2

Example: category affinity algorithm

For example, viewing the men's-clothing category, then accessories, then jewelry, then accessories again in a session results in affinities of:

accessories: 9 (+5 – 1 + 5)
men's-clothing: 8 (+10 – 1 – 1)
jewelry: 5 (+5)

When the session ends, and the user later returns to the site, the scores are halved:

accessories: 4.5 (9/2)
men's-clothing: 4 (8/2)
jewelry: 2.5 (5/2)

Assuming the user then views, in order, jewelry, accessories, beauty, shoes, and women's-clothing :

accessories: 6.5 (4.5 + 5 – 1 – 1 - 1)
women' s-clothing: 5 (+5)
jewelry: 4.5 (2.5 + 5 – 1 – 1 - 1)
shoes: 4 (+5 – 1)
beauty : 3 (+5 – 1 - 1)
men's-clothing is dropped after the final click of women's-clothing as the lowest-scoring category with a score of 1 (4 – 1 – 1 - 1)

When the session ends, and the user later returns to the site, the scores are halved: