Understand audience definitions

An audience represents a segment of the shoppers that visit your store.

You define these audiences in the Audience window by creating rules that include or exclude shoppers according to their profile attributes. For example, you could create an audience called Student Females Outside Texas that includes female shoppers that have an .edu email address, but excludes people living in Texas. The rules that define this audience might look something like this:

Include these people:

• People whose Gender is Female
• and whose Email Address ends with .edu
• and whose Shipping Address State is not Texas

After you define this audience, you can deliver personalized content to shoppers who match Student Females Outside Texas criteria.

To comply with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a shopper may be required to provide consent to have their shopper profile data used for personalization. If a registered shopper is required to provide GDPR profile personalization consent (if the GDPR profile personalization site setting is set to true for that site) and does not, the non-consenting shopper is not recognized as a member of any audience that uses shopper profile data even though they may meet the audience rules criteria. For information on GDPR consent and profile-based personalization, see Manage the Use of Personal Data.

Parts of an audience definition

An audience definition is composed of the following parts:

• Display Name This is the name that appears in administration interfaces.
• ID This ID is automatically generated from the display name that you provide. You can override the generated one if you want and create your own ID.
• Rules This set of rules consist of one or more rules that you define to include or exclude shoppers.
• Enabled/Disabled This determines if an audience can be used in production. No shopper is considered a member of a disabled audience even if the audience is in use by a content variation slot, a promotion, or an experiment.
• Visitor Type This determines if an audience includes only anonymous shoppers, only registered shoppers or all shoppers (registered and anonymous)
• Match All Rules/Match Any Rules toggle. Whether a shopper must match all of the audience rules to be considered a member of the audience, or whether matching at least one of the rules is sufficient.
• Capture reporting data for this audience This determines whether membership in this audience should be evaluated and recorded for reporting purposes, when a shopper submits an order.

Attribute categories

Commerce groups attributes into categories.

Attribute category	Description
Account	Attributes of shoppers who have logged in using contact credentials that have been defined as part of a business account. This category only appears if account-based shopping has been enabled in your environment. Contact your Oracle account manager for more details on how to activate this functionality.
Revenue	The revenue information of shoppers, including their recent purchases, the frequency of their purchase and the monetary value of both individual and all purchases.
Engagement	The frequency and number of visits made to the site by the shopper.
Geolocation	The geographical location of the shopper, which are attributes associated with the shopper’s current location.
Entry Page	The Entry Page is a landing page on the Oracle Commerce site or a Referring site. It enables merchants to automatically apply promotions for shoppers visiting from a particular referring site, and provide a different experience for segments of shoppers landing directly on a particular page of the website.
Entry Page Query Parameter	Entry page attributes that can be used in rules to more effectively personalize site experiences. For most merchants the majority of site visits start at another place, for example, another site, a Google search leading to a shopper clicking on a Pay Per Click (PPC) ad, a marketing email or a Facebook ad. Marketers can use UTM parameters (used by Google Analytics and other systems) or custom query parameters to pass context for a site visit from an external site, a PPC ad, a marketing email, or another source. You can define your own custom query parameters if you use systems other than Google Analytics or have more complex needs.
Browsing	Shopper browsing behavior, that is, views of products or collections, in the current visit. Tracking shopper browsing behavior enables merchants to design appropriate site experiences for those shoppers. For example, merchants can promote a product or a collection of products to regular viewers of the product or collection of products, or suggest a product to a shopper before checkout.
Device	Attributes of the device (such as a computer, tablet, or phone) the shopper is using to access the site.
Shopper Profile	Attributes of individual registered shoppers who have logged in to a personal account
Audience	Audience attributes are existing audiences that can be used in rules to categorize shoppers who are members of existing audiences. This category only appears as a choice in the interface after you have defined at least one audience.

Attributes available in all categories

The attributes listed in the following table are in both the shopper profile and account categories. In the shopper profile category, these attributes belong to the individual shopper. In the account category, these attributes belong to the account.

Attribute	Description
Shipping Address City	City for the shopper's default shipping address.
Shipping Address State	State for the shopper's default shipping address.
Shipping Address Postal Code	Postal or zip code for the shopper's default shipping address.
Shipping Address Country	Country for the shopper's default shipping address.
Registration date	The date that the shopper’s profile was created.

Attributes only available in the engagement category

The following attributes are available only in the engagement category.

Attribute	Description
First visit date	The date of the shopper’s first visit to a site. For the site on which the shopper registered, the first visit date is the same as the registration date. Note: If a shopper’s registration date is before the current release, the first visit date is the shopper’s first visit after the shopper upgrades to the current release.
Previous visit date	For a currently logged in shopper, the date of the visit before the current one. For a shopper who is not logged in, the date of the visit before the last one. Note: Another attribute, Last visit date, is the date of the current visit for a currently logged in shopper, or the date of the last visit for a shopper who is not logged in.
Number of Visits	The anonymous or registered shopper’s number of visits to a site. The number includes the current visit. For registered users who existed before the 18D release, the number of visits is set to the number of orders made. For anonymous shoppers who existed before 18D, the default number of visits is set to 2.

Attributes only available in the revenue category

The following are attributes that are available in the revenue category.

The following attributes are available for both logged-in shoppers and anonymous shoppers: First Purchase Date, Last Purchase Date, Last Purchase Amount, Lifetime Average Order Value, Lifetime Spend, and Number of orders. For additional information on these attributes, refer to Qualifying orders.

Attribute	Description	Site- Specific
First purchase date	The date of the shopper’s first order. Order must be a qualifying order.	Yes
Last purchase date	The date of the shopper’s last order. Order must be a qualifying order.	Yes
Last purchase amount	Total of the shopper’s last order, including tax and shipping. Order must be a qualifying order.	Yes
Lifetime average order value	Average of the shopper’s order totals, including tax and shipping. Orders must be qualifying orders.	Yes
Lifetime spend	Grand total, including tax and shipping, of the shopper’s order totals. Orders must be qualifying orders.	Yes
Number of orders	Number of orders for this shopper. Orders must be qualifying orders.	Yes

Attributes only available in the shopper profile category

The attributes listed in the following table are only available in the shopper profile category.

Attribute	Description	Site-specific (if multiple sites exist)
Date of Birth	The shopper’s date of birth	No
Email address	The shopper’s email address	No
Receive email	A shopper can opt in/opt out of email notifications	No
Gender	The shopper’s gender. You can only use this attribute in a rule if you are collecting gender information in a custom widget.	No
Currency	The currency used when making orders. Mandatory for these properties: Lifetime average order value Lifetime spend Last purchase amount When the user creates a rule with a currency property, the currency is initially set to the currency of the default price list group of the default site.	Yes

Note: If you use different default currencies on different sites, and you want to create audiences based on Lifetime Spend or Lifetime Average Order Value, define an audience for each site (currency). For example, you can define an audience “High Spenders USD” with the rule “Lifetime Spend > 1000” and another audience “High Spenders euro” with the rule “Lifetime Spend > 940”.

Qualifying orders

A qualifying order must meet the following conditions.

• The order uses the shopper’s lifetime currency. The shopper lifetime currency is set to the currency of the first order made in a monetary currency. If a shopper subsequently makes an order in a different monetary currency, the value of that order will not be included in monetary lifetime order values.

  Note that if a site’s default currency is monetary, and shoppers can use loyalty points to pay for some or all of an order, then Lifetime spend and Lifetime average order value attributes reflect only the monetary portion of the total - even if this total consists only of tax and shipping.

• The order is in one of the following states:
  • SUBMITTED

    The order has completed the purchase process and has been submitted to the order management system.

  • PROCESSING

    The order is being processed by the order management system.

  • NO_PENDING_ACTION

    The order has been fulfilled, and processing of the order is complete.

• Each payment associated with the order is in one of the following payment states:
  • AUTHORIZED

    The payment has been authorized and can be debited.

  • SETTLED

    The payment has been debited successfully.

  • PAYMENT_DEFERRED

    Only applicable for invoice and PO orders where an invoice is sent to the shopper.

For more information on order and payment states, see Manage Orders.

Attributes only available in the account category

The attributes listed in the following table are only available in the account category.

Attribute	Description
Customer Type	The type of industry to which this customer belongs.
Name	Name of the account
Type	The type of organization, for example, department or division. This cannot be a null value.
Billing Address City	City where shopper’s bills are sent.
Billing Address State	State where shopper’s bills are sent.
Billing Address Postal Code	Postal code or zip code where shopper’s bills are sent.
Billing Address Country	Country where shopper’s bills are sent.

Attributes only available in the geolocation category

The attributes listed in the following table are available in the geolocation category.

Attribute	Description
Latitude	Truncated latitude, that is, the integer portion plus first two decimal points. For example, North of 36 degrees North is represented by the following: Attribute: Latitude, Operator: North Of, Value: 36.00
Longitude	Truncated longitude, that is, the integer portion plus first two decimal points. For example, US states between 165 degrees West and 105 degrees West is represented by the following: Attribute: Longitude, Operator: Westward between, Start Value: 165.00 West, End Value: 105.00 West
Place	A place can be a country, region or city. Start entering the name of the place, then use typeahead to select the right value. Note: Region differ in granularity by country. For example, in the United States, regions are equivalent to States; but in the United Kingdom they are equivalent to England, Wales and other regions. Only cities worldwide with a population of more than 100,000 people are included.
Timezone	Time zone is formatted as offset from GMT plus time zone and geographic area. For example, GMT-5 EST Eastern Standard Time.

Attributes only available in the entry page category

The attributes listed in the following table are available in the entry page category.

Attribute	Description
Landing page URL	This can be used to present a personalized experience to shoppers landing on a particular set of landing pages on the site. For example, landing page URL contains holiday.
Referring site	If a customer reaches a Commerce site from a link on a third party site, that site is the referring site. Note: Audience rules based on the referring site URL do not function correctly for shoppers browsing in Mozilla Firefox using private browsing mode.

Attributes only available in the entry page query parameters category

The attributes listed in the following table are available in the entry page query parameter category. The data type for these attributes is a string property that can have multiple values at a time. In addition to the available UTM parameters, you can also create custom query parameters and set a value for each parameter, if you use systems other than Google Analytics or have more complex needs.

Attribute	Description
utm_campaign	Campaign name, which is commonly used by marketers to uniquely identify a marketing campaign.
utm_source	Identifies where the traffic is coming from, for example, email marketing, Pay Per Click (PPC), social, organic search and third party sites. source is typically something like Google, Facebook or Twitter, or the name of an affiliate, ad platform, or publisher. It’s used to indicate the context the user was in when they clicked a link.
utm_term	Indicates the paid keyword used. Term is often used for paid search terms and keywords to identify the audience at a finer grain than the campaign, when you purchase multiple terms for the same campaign.
utm_medium	The advertising or marketing medium, for example, email marketing, special offers, Pay Per Click (PPC), social, or third party site. It can also be used for the channel, for example, mobile, web, or kiosk.
utm_content	Content is often used with paid ads to represent the content of the ad, or with click-throughs to represent the content of the call to action (CTA) that the user clicked.

Attributes only available in the browsing category

The attributes listed in the following table are available in the browsing category.

Attribute	Description
Device Type	The type of device, for example, Mobile or Non-Mobile.
Operating System	The operating system of the device, for example, Android or iOS.
Product Page	An individual product. Note: Viewing a list of products within collection pages or clicking the Quick View of a product does not qualify as a product page view.
Product Name	Products whose names contain a localized string, for example, Vitamin C.
Product Criteria	Any combination of product brand, collection and product type. You do not need to specify a value for every field. Note: Number of views is being defined as unique views of products. Viewing the same product multiple times in a visit counts as one view.
Collection Page	An individual collection, for example, the Vitamins collection.
Collection Name	Collections whose names contain a localized string. Note: Number of views is being defined as unique views of collections. Viewing the same collection multiple times in a visit counts as one view.

Types of behavioral audience rules

You can define three types of behavioral audience rules:

• Precise attributes match views of individual products or collections. Product Page and Collection Page are precise attributes. For example, a rule that includes shoppers who viewed the product page for NH Ultra Vitamin C 100 tablets two or more times in the current visit:

  Attribute: Product Page, Operator: viewed, Product: NH Ultra Vitamin C 100 tablets, Number of Views: >= 2

• Broad attributes match views of products or collections where the name matches a specified string. Product Name and Collection Name are broad attributes. For example, a rule that includes shoppers who viewed at least three collections whose name contain "Vitamin" three or more times in the current visit:

  Attribute: Collection Name, Operator: viewed, Name: Vitamin, Number of Views: >= 3

• Powerful attributes use product criteria to specify products which match any combination of brand, collection and product type. Product Criteria is a powerful attribute. For example, a rule that includes shoppers who viewed at least two products whose brand is Ultra and in the Vitamin collection:

  Attribute: Product Criteria, Operator: viewed, Brand: Ultra, Collection: Vitamins, Number of Views: >= 2

The language picker

The language picker is displayed on the Product Name, Collection Name and Product Criteria attribute pages. The language picker contains a list of applicable store content languages (as defined in Settings > Location). The default value is the store content language in use at the time when the rule is created. Once you select a language, the value is used for the entire session in the current visit. For example, if the selected language is English, the rule will match the English name of the product to the string. If only one language is defined for store content, the language string is displayed.

Use gender in rules for audiences

If you want to define an audience that uses the gender attribute in the rule, you must be sure that your store includes a gender element that a shopper can use to provide gender data. You can add this element by customizing a widget that is deployed in your store.

Gender is included as a property in the user view model which is available to all widgets. You can add gender to a widget by updating the HTML in the widget’s template. For example,

<div class="form-group row">
 <div class="controls col-md-12">
  <label class="control-label inline" for="CC-userRegistration-gender">Gender</label>
  <select class="col-md-5 form-control" data-bind="value:gender">
    <option value="" disabled selected>Select your gender</option>
    <option value="male">Male</option>
    <option value="female">Female</option>
    <option value="unspecified">Unspecified</option>
  </select>
 </div>
</div>

For information about updating the HTML in a widget or stack, see Modify a component’s code.

Use numbers in rules for audiences

If you want to define an audience that uses a numeric attribute in a rule, note the following:

• You can only enter one number in a value field. You cannot enter a list of numbers.
• The number cannot be less than zero.
• The Between operator is inclusive. For the rule to be a match, a value must be equal to or between the low and high values.

Use dates in rules for audiences

If you want to define an audience that uses a date attribute in a rule, note that date values are represented as a series of values for each date unit: year, month, and day. When a rule with a date is evaluated, only the individual date unit that is specified is the unit that is changed.

The following example illustrates how rules with date properties are evaluated.

Let’s say that today’s date is May 5, 2017. This date can be expressed in these date units:

Year = 2017

Month =5

Day = 5

In a rule with “More than 3 months ago”, “month” is the specified unit, so 3 is subtracted from the month unit:

Year = 2017

Month = 2 (that is, 5-3)

Day = 5

Therefore, any date before February 5, 2017 evaluates as true.

Months have different numbers of days, so let’s look at another example, where this difference can affect how your rule is evaluated. Let’s say that today is May 30, 2017. In the same rule with “More than 3 months ago,” “month” is still the specified unit, so 3 is again subtracted from the month unit:

Year = 2017

Month = 2 (that is, 5-3)

Day = 30

A date of February 30, 2017 does not exist, but the rule can still evaluate dates. In this case all days in February would evaluate as true.

Weeks and date attributes

Remember that date values are represented as a series of values for each date unit: year, month, and day. There is no week unit. Weeks are the equivalent of seven days. For example, “more than 3 weeks ago,” is the same as “more than 21 days ago.”

Timestamps and the date attribute

Even though rules do not include timestamps in any of the available rule operators for dates, timestamps do affect how a rule is evaluated.

For example, let’s say that the rule for an audience is “Last Purchase Date is Less than 1 day ago”. The current date and time is March 15, 2017, 12:00 PM GMT. The rule evaluation will calculate a date exactly 1 day from the current date and time, which will be March 14, 2017, 12:00 PM GMT. If Last Purchase Date is equal to March 14, 2017, 11:00 AM GMT, the rule evaluates as true. If Last Purchase Date is equal to March 14, 2017, 1:00 PM GMT, the rule evaluates as false.

Note that all time is evaluated in GMT.

Between operator in rules with date attributes

Just like with number attributes, when a date attribute uses a Between operator, the operator is inclusive. For the rule to be a match, a value must be between or equal to one of the low and high date values.

Custom properties

You can create custom properties using the Admin API and include them as attributes in your rules when you define an audience. Custom properties are available in shopper profile and account categories, and can be created as custom string property or custom property for rich text fragment (custom rich text property. For example, partnerCustomerData contains the value: partner=AirPortugal ). The custom property:

• Must be a string, Boolean, date, numeric, or rich text data type.
• Must have audienceVisibility set to all for shopper profile properties, and to b2b for account properties.
• Can have appropriate value up to 1,000 characters if it's a custom rich text property.
• Is not used in the rules for calculating audience size if it's a custom rich text property.

The audienceVisibility attribute determines whether or not a property appears as a choice in the Attributes field of the audience interface.

• For shopper profile properties, see Manage Shopper Profiles.
• For account properties, see Manage an Account-based Storefront.

Estimated audience size

The Estimated audience size under Rules displays an estimate of how many users are in a specific audience. It returns the number of registered shoppers that match any or all of the rules depending on the current value of the Rule Matching selection list. Anonymous shoppers are not included in the estimates. In a multiple-site environment, the audience size is estimated for the default site. You can select an alternative site to see the impact on estimates.

Each successive rule shows the new size of the audience with that rule added.

• For Match Any Rule, each successive rule adds just those shoppers who satisfy that rule but did not satisfy any of the previous ones. The audience can only grow or stay the same size as rules are added, and each new size shows that growth.
• For Match All Rules, each successive rule adds a new restriction to the audience, removing shoppers who satisfied the previous rules but do not satisfy the new one. The audience can only decrease or stay the same size as rules are added, and each new size shows that decrease.

Changing the order of the rules affects the size estimates per rule on the Audiences page, but does not affect the audience size and shoppers evaluated as being members of the audience. To see the accurate size of a rule on the Audiences page, create an audience with only that rule.

If the GDPR profile personalization site setting is set to true for that site, audience size estimate takes GDPR into consideration for the numerator only in calculations. For example, among 100 shoppers, 40 have provided GDPR consent for that site, and 25 are in the audience. Commerce displays:

• Audience size estimate of 25 shoppers for the site
• Audience size estimate of 25 shoppers for the site

Percentage value of shoppers as 25% (based on 25/100)

For information on GDPR consent and profile-based personalization, see Understand consent and profile-based personalization in Manage the Use of Personal Data.