# Can an audience target visitors who showed interest in certain categories?

Asked by Priya Nair on 2026-09-01. Tags: cql, audiences, behavioral.

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

### Accepted answer from Juliana Amorim (2026-09-02)

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:

```cql
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](https://docs.croct.com/reference/cql/data-types/user/user).

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](https://docs.croct.com/explanation/audience/introduction)
for how that fits together.

### Answer from greg_b (2026-09-04)

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.