Topics & Supertopics
Topics
Simply put, a Topic is an attribute tied to the documents your users interact with. By default, these documents are the URLs on your site, but they can also be customized to include items from a product catalog. Each document is associated with a set of Topics that reflect the content it contains.
Every user profile automatically includes the URLs they've visited. Thanks to the connection between URLs and their associated Topics, Lytics can algorithmically determine which Topics a user is interested in based on their behavior. This algorithmically derived interest is represented as a score on the user's profile that can be used in audience building and more.
This process forms the foundation of Lytics' content recommendations and helps you build audiences around content affinity.
Since topic affinities are a product of user behavior, conclusions can only be drawn about topic affinities relative to other topics and other users. For these reasons, attempting to calculate topic aversion would be an unsafe extrapolation.
Supertopics
A Supertopic combines one or more Topics into a targetable group. While Topics provide detailed insights, they can often be too specific for broader marketing strategies. That's where Supertopics come in — they let you group related Topics into a more actionable unit.
For example, imagine you're a car dealership looking to target customers interested in luxury cars. You could create a Luxury Cars Supertopic that includes brands like BMW, Audi, and Mercedes. This Supertopic lets you build an audience of users with an interest in any luxury car brand, which you can then export to ad networks or other marketing platforms for targeted campaigns.
To view both, select Topics under Content in the Lytics navigation bar. Supertopics and Topics share that one page, and a Context layer selector scopes everything on it.
Affinities, Supertopics, and Affinity Scores
Supertopics were previously called Affinities, and you will still meet the older word in a few places. The distinction is worth knowing, because it is not an inconsistency — the two words name different things.
| What it is | What it's called |
|---|---|
| A named group of Topics | A Supertopic. This is what was called an Affinity. |
| A user's 0-to-1 interest score, and its bands | An affinity score, in bands named High Affinity, Some Affinity, Low Affinity and Uninterested. |
| The profile fields holding the scores | lytics_content for Topics, lytics_rollup for Supertopics. Their schema labels read Content Topics and Content Affinities. |
| The API | Still uses affinity in its paths and payloads, permanently. |
So a Supertopic's summary page reports an avg affinity score, and that is correct: the group is a Supertopic, the measure is an affinity.
Nothing in your account changed with the rename. Your existing Affinities are your Supertopics, under the same names, with the same member Topics and the same scores. Audiences you have already built keep working, and so do rules written against lytics_content or lytics_rollup. Audiences whose names Lytics generated from a band — ending in high_affinity or some_affinity, for instance — keep those names.
In the Audience Builder, a rule on a Supertopic reads lytics_rollup.`Supertopic name`, and a rule on a single Topic reads lytics_content.`Topic name`. Neither field name contains the word affinity; see Profile Common Schema for the full list.
Resources
- Topics: Explore how to use Topics within the Lytics UI.
- Supertopics: Learn how to create, edit, rename, and use Supertopics in the Lytics UI.
- Using Topics & Supertopics: Discover how you can use Topics and Supertopics effectively.
Updated about 6 hours ago