Target users interested in a topic recently, not from a year ago?
We tag interests from article reads at our media site, so a politics reader picks up a politics interest on their profile. Now we're promoting a new politics vertical with
user has shown interest in ["politics"]and it matches people whose last politics read was ancient. Someone who binged election coverage a year ago and reads sports now still gets the promo.
Is there a way to scope interest conditions to recent behavior, or do I need to rethink how we tag
2 answers
You do not need to rebuild your tagging. user has shown interest in ["shoes", "clothes"] style conditions are the behavioral interest check, and the segmentation engine supports recency and frequency conditions on top of the 100+ signals it tracks. So "interested in politics AND active recently" is expressible without leaving the audience editor.
When the requirement is strictly "this session", compose the interest check with session conditions instead:
user has shown interest in ["politics"] and session's stats' pageviews > 3or gate on a concrete page visit with a user has viewed a page with path "/politics" style check. Session conditions reset every visit by definition, which is the tightest recency window you can get.
We hit exactly this at a publisher I worked with. The reading history playbook on the Croct blog walks through the content-affinity pattern end to end, including how to keep stale affinities from dominating.
The mental model that helped us: profile interests answer "has this person ever cared about X", session and page-view conditions answer "do they care right now". A promo for a new vertical usually wants the intersection of both, not the profile check alone.