Building Audiences: Content Affinity

The Content Affinity tab in the audience builder is used to add Affinity-based rules to your audience. Since Affinities are a group of related Topics, this allows you to effectively target users interested in several subjects or products.

In the example above, we created a "Lavender" Affinity for an online beauty store, which includes 6 Topics such as "lavender", "lavender lotion", and "lavender luxury." Instead of creating an audience with 6 rules (one per Topic), we just select our Lavender Affinity that contains those 6 Topics.

Once you choose an Affinity for your audience, you will be able to select the range of affinity values. The histogram displays the distribution of user interest for the selected Affinity and is helpful to build an audience that has the desired size. By default, users with Any Affinity are selected. You can choose a built-in range by clicking any of the Affinity buttons or, to set a custom range, use the slider to refine the range of users to target. As you change the range, the total number of users that fit the range is shown in the right column.

As soon as you create an Affinity, Lytics start scoring users against it as they interact with your content or products. For active users, you can expect this number to start populating within a few days. For inactive users, it can take up to 2 weeks for them to be scored against an Affinity. So it's recommended that you create Affinities in advance of the audience needed for an Affinity-based campaign.

Under the Custom Rule tab in the Audience Builder, you can find the existing audiences based on Topics in your content taxonomy. If you want to create new audiences based on a single Topic, you can do so as follows:

1. Search for "Topics" in the Custom Rule tab of the Audience Builder
2. Select the Topic of interest.
3. Set the threshold according to the desired users' level of interest in that Topic.

Once you hit "Add Condition", the custom rule for a Topic will look like this:

Although Topics are still supported in the Audience Builder, we strongly recommend you use Affinities to build audiences for a more efficient workflow and more effective targeting.

Some users may find a field named Inferred Content Affinity when trying to build affinity or topic based audiences. This field contains topics that a user could be interested in even though they may not have interacted with the topics directly. To learn more about how these inferrences are made, you can read about our content taxonomy process. Note that topic affinity already includes this information, but this field contains only inferred affinity. We would also recommend not using this field to build audiences as it is not a wholistic view of a user's affinity.