Affinities Introduction

The Lytics Affinity Engine helps to reinforce one of the most important relationships in digital marketing -- that between your customers and the content and products with which they engage. When a user views an article on your website, or purchases one of your products, what can we infer about a user's preferences based on that activity?

Affinity Engine allows you to enrich each customer's activity with a broader meaning and define inferences for different types of activity. When we tie a user's behavior to a set of broader implications, we garner a much deeper understanding of each user. In Lytics, the enriched understanding of each user is actionable out-of-the-box. You can build audiences based on this information, drive recommendations tailored to each user, and use this enriched information as valuable inputs into our Lookalike Model builder. Read more on leveraging Affinities.

Topics are the atomic unit of Affinity Engine. A Topic is simply an attribute associated with what your users are interacting with. For articles, each article could have a set of Topics that represent the subject matter. For products, perhaps each product has a set of tags that represent things about the product. Those tags could be used as Topics. If you are more data science minded, you can think of Topics as features of each thing a user interacts with. As a user continues to interact with your brand, Lytics uses our Affinity Engine to hone in on what Topics are of most interest to each user.

An Affinity groups one or more Topics into a targetable unit. In most cases, Topics are too fine-grained for marketing use cases. More commonly, you'll want to create an Affinity consisting of multiple Topics that share something in common.

For example, let's say you are a car dealership and you want to target users who are interested in luxury cars. You could create a Luxury Car Affinity that contains brands like BMW, Audi, Mercedes, etc. This Affinity would allow you to create an audience of users who have an affinity for any luxury car brand, and export that audience to various ad networks or other marketing tools.

Affinity Engine allows your data team to import activity data so that Lytics can fully leverage it, while allowing your marketing team to organize the information in a way that enables their marketing campaigns. By grouping Topics into Affinities, your team can leverage the Lytics Affinity Engine to enable all sorts of data-driven marketing use cases.