Can an audience target visitors who showed interest in certain categories?
I am planning a merchandising experience aimed at visitors whose behaviour shows an affinity for a couple of product categories, say shoes and clothes.
I would rather not rely on a stored profile field that I have to populate myself and keep in sync. Can CQL read that kind of behavioural interest directly from what people actually do on the site?
2 answers
It can, and the distinction you are drawing is exactly the right one to make.
The behavioural form reads observed activity rather than a field you set:
user has shown interest in ["shoes", "clothes"]That is different from user's interests contains all of ["shoes", "clothes"], which tests the stored interests attribute you would populate yourself. The behavioural version is inferred from what the visitor does, so you do not have to keep a field in sync. Both are documented alongside the other profile predicates in the user data types reference.
The one prerequisite is that the underlying signals are being tracked, since the behavioural condition is only as good as the activity it can observe. Once that is in place it evaluates in real time and attaches to the experience serving the slot, same as any other audience, see the audiences overview for how that fits together.
We use the has-shown-interest form for exactly this on a homepage rail. It picks the merchandising block based on the category affinity, and because it reads behaviour we did not have to build any tagging on top of the catalog. Just make sure the category events are flowing before you rely on it, on a brand new setup it needs a bit of traffic to have anything to read.