Reference Guide

Advertising Services Version 1.3
127
When you gather demographic information, that is information that can
directly place a person into a group, then you are able to use that information
to provide personalized advertising.
5.2 Custom fields & intelligent delivery of advertising
User information can only be used for intelligent delivery if the information
places the user directly into a group. For example, a user’s gender or age
group places that user into a group, but their phone number or email address
does not.
NOTE For a detailed discussion of this, refer to the previous section on demographic
and non-demographic information (§5.1).
Certain types of form fields allow users to select a single choice from a small
list of available options. These types of fields are:
 Checkboxes – A user can choose to tick the checkbox or not tick
it. That is, they must be in one of two possible groups.
 Checklists – A user is presented with a (typically small) number of
checkboxes. For each checkbox, they can choose to tick or not
tick the box. Each choice places them in one of the two possible
groups.
 Radio buttons – A user is presented with a (typically small)
number of mutually exclusive options. They can choose only one
of the options. They are placed into the group corresponding to
their selection.
 Dropdown – As with radio buttons, a user is presented with a
(typically small) number of mutually exclusive options. They can
choose only one of the options. They are placed into the group
corresponding to their selection.
Only the above types of form fields (checkboxes, checklists, radio buttons and
dropdown lists) can be used to gather information for intelligent delivery.
Other field types, such as text fields, can be used to gather important user
information, but they cannot be used to influence the delivery of advertising.
5.3 Reporting on user information
The Advertising Services plugin provides a simple reporting interface (§4.6)
through which you can access the information that your system has collected.
For example, assuming that you have customized your guest registration
forms to gather gender and age group information, you can produce a chart
that shows the breakdown of your users by gender and age group by creating
a chart with:
 The Primary dropdown set to: Users – User
 The Primary Statistic dropdown set to: Count
 The Secondary dropdown set to: gender – Gender