Targeting Ads: Weight and Target Group

  • Article

Using Commerce Server, you can determine when an ad is displayed, where, and to whom. When you create an ad, you specify the following:

  • Exposure limit. The number of times the ad can be shown to a user within a session. If your site uses user profiles to store campaign history, then the exposure limit is the number of times the ad can be shown to a user within a cross-session.

  • Weight. A means of determining how frequently an ad is displayed, relative to all of the campaign items for a given customer. In a campaign, weight only applies to ads that are goaled at the campaign level. If the ads are goaled at the item level, weight is not used for paid ads.

    For house ads the weight is relative to all other house ads for all customers and all campaigns. For paid ads, the weight is relative to other paid ads in the same campaign. The weight of an individual campaign item is relative to the weight of all the other campaign items.

    For example, assume you have four ads to sell paint, and you assign the weight as follows:

    Ad Weight Percentage of times served
    Blue paint 1 10
    Green paint 2 20
    Red paint 3 30
    Yellow paint 4 40
    Total weight 10 100

    The total weight of all the ads is 100 (10+20+30+40 = 100). The blue paint ad has a weight of 1 so it will be displayed once out of every ten ad requests.

    For paid ads, the weight is the ratio of a single ad to the sum of all the campaign items for that campaign. For house ads, the weight is the sum of the weights of all other house ads in the campaign.

    For ads that are goaled at the campaign item level, weight is not used to determine the delivery of the ad. Instead, you directly specify the number of requests or clicks that should be served.

  • Page groups. A set of related Web pages is tagged with a particular page group name and used for targeting ads. For example, if you are running a newspaper site, you might create a page group for Sports, one for the Top Story, and another for Local News. You can then target ads to display only on pages in certain page groups.

    You create page groups by using the Reference Tables module.

  • Target groups. A collection of targets to which content will be displayed. For example, you can target ads to users who have specific profile properties.

See Also

Components of an Ad

Processing Ads: Content Selection Framework

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