How to choose the correct Visitor target?

HawkSearch provides an array of fields based on which Visitor targets may be created. In broad terms, Visitor targets can be created either using a predefined field or with a customize-able field.

Pre-determined fields help identify the visitor’s attribute automatically while customizable fields allow values to be passed. HawkSearch identifies the location based on the default headers in the http request it receives.

Pre-defined fields:

Some visitor targets provide readily available options. Choosing these will help quickly setup rules (campaigns) to customize the user experience.

For example, to target the user based on the location, choose the State, City or Country based visitor targets.

To apply rules based on the time of day, choose below value:

Options with customize-able values:

These fields need to be passed to HawkSearch in the search request in addition to the workbench setup. When the business condition calls for a custom requirement such as to display a banner only if the end user was redirected from a website example.com

Custom:

This is the most common of all the customizable Visitor target types. See this to know how to setup a custom visitor target: Custom Visitor Targets

This needs the hawkcustom parameter to be passed explicitly in the search request.

Source:

This field is setup similar to the above Custom Visitor Target however, this is mainly used to distinguish the source of the search request. Use the Source field to distinguish between various sources of the search request.

A good example could be a form of marketing media such as an email message, a social media website, B2B, B2C commerce software, etc.

For the above example, any campaign created based on this Visitor Target will be triggered when we pass hawksource=email in the search request.

See Also: Visitor Targets Strategies