Targeting and Personalization Concepts

Targeting and personalization are 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 might want to deliver tennis-related information only to tennis players, or to users who are interested in tennis. You might want to deliver announcements about upcoming tennis tournaments, or advertisements and promotions for tennis products.

You can use Commerce Server 2002 Enterprise Edition to perform two types of targeting:

• Expression-based targeting. Also known as explicit targeting. This is used when you know the profile properties of the users to whom you are delivering content, or you know the context, and you know what content is to be delivered. You use the Campaigns modules in Commerce Server Business Desk to specify this information and deliver the content to the user.
• Prediction. Also known as implicit targeting. This is used when you do not know all the necessary profile properties to target the user, or you do not have specific content to deliver. You use the Commerce Server Predictor resource to extrapolate this information from existing user data so that you can deliver content of interest to each user. For conceptual information about prediction, see Prediction and Data Mining Concepts.

Both expression-based targeting and prediction improve your ability to deliver content that might 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.

This section contains:

• Using Targeting Methods in Web Site Management
• Expression-Based Targeting
• Processing Expressions

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