Add a Target Audience

Prerequisites

Before creating a target audience for a web task, ensure that you are familiar with the following information:

• Targeting for Web, In-App Message, Mobile Spot Tasks
• Types of Data Available for Targeting

About Targeting

The target audience for your task is the set of people that you want to see your content. If a person is a member of a target audience, it means that the person is eligible to receive task content. However, membership in a target audience does not guarantee that the person gets the content. For example:

• If the target audience member of an A/B test task is in the control group, that person does not see the creatives that are part of the test task.
• A user might not scroll far enough on a web page for a creative that appears below the fold.
• There are competing tasks delivering content to the same spot. In this case, the content that is delivered is based on task priority. If the priorities are equal, the content is delivered randomly.

Target audiences are built by adding criteria or segments to the Targeting tab. The Targeting tab contains these pages:

• On the Eligible page, you can specify which people to include in your target audience.
• On the Exclusions page, you can specify which people to exclude from your target audience.

When adding criteria, these folders are available:

• Current Session Attributes contains session data for the current session. In this category you can find information about web and mobile sessions such as browser and device details. In addition, you can see whether the session was started by a new or returning user.
  Note: The current session is the session that the user was active in while interacting with the content that was delivered by a task. For example, if the Browser and Device criteria value is set to Chrome, the only people eligible to be members of the target audience are those people who are using Chrome during the current session.
• Customer Behavior contains event-based data that is collected based on a user’s behavior. This folder includes events and data views. You can select events from tasks that are complete to target on something that happened in the past. This folder also contains the New Session event, which is used when targeting based on historical sessions.
• Customer Profile contains customer data, including existing segments. If applicable, it also includes imported data and transient files.
• Spots contains spots that are used in the current task and contain attributes. This folder is available only for web tasks and mobile spot tasks, and contains only tasks that satisfy these conditions:
  • The spot is being used in the task.
  • The spot contains attributes.
• Decision Flows and Models contains data from SAS Intelligent Decisioning. This folder appears only after SAS Intelligent Decisioning is enabled for your tenant. For more information, contact SAS Technical Support.

Options for Working with Criteria

As you add criteria, you can use these options to view, move, or copy the criteria.

• Click to view a summary of the criteria.
• Click to make a copy of the criteria. Copying criteria saves steps when you use the same criteria but supply different values.
• Click or to move criteria up or down in the list. The position determines the order in which the criteria are checked.
• Click to create a group for a set of criteria. Groups enable you to nest criteria.
• Click to delete criteria.

Add Criteria to Your Web Task

Navigate to the Eligible or Exclusions page and repeat these steps as needed to add criteria:

1. Click to add a criteria row.
2. In the Specify criteria box, click .
3. In the Select Criteria window, select the criteria to add.

   To locate criteria, use these options:

   • Click to display a hierarchical folder view of criteria. Click to display individual merge tags in alphabetical order.
   • Click to expand all of the folders. Click to collapse all of the folders.
   • Click to view details, if available, about the criteria.
   • Search for criteria by entering the name in the Search field. Select criteria and click to display details.
4. Click OK.
5. If applicable, in the Specify values box, click and specify a value for the criteria. For example, if Channel is your selected criterion, you might specify a value of Mobile or Web. Whereas, there is no need to specify a value if a segment is selected.

   If you are adding events as criteria, you have these additional options:

   • Add event occurrence details. To change the occurrence of the event, click . By default, events must occur at least once in the previous week (7 days) to be eligible. However, by editing the event occurrence, you can specify the number of times that the event must occur in order to be eligible. You can also select the time period in which the occurrences must happen.
     Note:

     • When adding event occurrence details to criteria, the time zone that is applied is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).
     • The time period for event occurrences includes historical data and is not impacted by the date on which the task is activated. For example, if a task is activated on February 1st and uses a default time period of one week, events from the previous week, which includes the end of January, are evaluated during targeting.
   • Select which event occurrence and attribute value to match. When you add an event to task targeting, you can select which event attribute is used to evaluate membership in the target audience. By default, the first event attribute value that the system detects is used when evaluating whether to include a person in the target audience. However, by selecting Only target users whose most recent event attribute values meet the criteria, you can change which attribute is evaluated.

     When the Only target users whose most recent event attribute values meet the criteria option is selected, only the most recent event with matching attributes is considered as criteria for inclusion in the target audience. As a result, selecting this option reduces the number of people who are eligible to be members of the target audience.

6. Select All of the following to include members who meet all of the criteria in a group. Or, select Any of the following to include members who meet one or more of the criteria in a group.
7. Click .