Using Score Key

Adverse will choose the top scoring Ads to display within a Zone. Adverse assigns a score to each Ad based on that Ad's past performance within the Zone. By using the score-key option on the Zone script, you have more fine-grained control over how the Ads are scored.

By default, the score of each Ad is scoped to the Zone. This means that the Zone ID is the only criteria that is taken into account when scoring Ads. In other words, Ads are compared against each other based on their historical performance for that Zone.

However, sometimes a zone will receive traffic from different visitor groups that can behave differently. For example, Ad "A" might perform well for group "X" but not for group "Y". In such a case we would want Ad "A" to score highly (and have a high position in the Zone) for group "X", and have a low score for group "Y". This can be done using score-key.

If we have different traffic sources (Sub IDs) and we want to keep our scores scoped to each source, we can pass the Sub ID of the traffic source as the value of score-key in our Zone script.

For example, if we have a Zone set up where we pass our traffic source/Sub ID to s1 it might look like this:

<script
  src="https://adverse.lincx.la/ad"
  data-zone-id="abc123"
  data-s1="X">
</script>

To use the traffic source as our score-key we would change our script tag to look like this when the visitor is from traffic source/Sub ID "X":

<script
  src="https://adverse.lincx.la/ad"
  data-zone-id="abc123"
  data-s1="X"
  data-score-key="X">
</script>

With this change, Ads will only be scored based on their performance for a particular traffic source. No matter how good or bad Ad "A" performs when the traffic source is "Y", the score and position of Ad "A" will be unaffected for visitors in group "X".