Classifying Traits with a Common Taxonomy

Last update: April 4, 2021

This article provides general overview about classifying traits with a common taxonomy.

The Audience Manager Taxonomy

The Audience Manager taxonomy is an optional feature that classifies traits using uniform, logical, and commonly understood naming conventions. It operates at the platform level to help ensure naming consistency throughout the Audience Manager ecosystem. Ultimately, the common taxonomy is designed to bring our product into greater alignment with industry standards regarding consumer privacy and opt-out processes.

Advantages of Trait Classification

Enabling our customers to build custom segments and data models is core to the Audience Manager model and to your ability to capture value from our platform. What is also required, however, is a robust and scalable means to communicate information about segments to your customers and partners. Furthermore, this communication requires that segment information is shared in an easy-to-understand and universally understood language while protecting your proprietary trait and segment names. The Audience Manager common taxonomy provides this language and capability.

The Taxonomy Uses Industry Standard Classification Categories

The common taxonomy is based on the classifications created by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB). Refer to the IAB’s website for more information about quality assurance guidelines for networks and exchanges.

Taxonomic Organization

The Audience Manager taxonomy organizes data into nested categories called tiers. Each category can contain up to 3 separate tiers for data classification. At the highest level, a Tier 1 category groups data into its most general form (e.g., geography). Subsequent tiers provide greater specificity to the higher level, general category (e.g., geography --> United States --> New York). However, not every category has 3 tiers, some use just 2.

Classify Traits in Data Categories

You assign taxonomic classifications when creating or editing traits in the Add New Trait Wizard (located in * Audience Data > Traits*). Refer to the documentation on creating traits for more information.

Working With the Taxonomy: Additional Considerations

If you decide to classify traits according to our common taxonomy, it’s important to remember:

  • Classification is optional.
  • Traits are not assigned to a taxonomic category by default (i.e., traits are not classified as “unknown” or “uncategorized” etc.).
  • Traits can belong to one taxonomic category only (multiple and cross-category classifications are not allowed).
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