Horizon

Horizon is Sailthru's unique behavioral tracking product. Horizon gathers data on your users' individual interests, based on activity on your website, mobile device and tablet, all tied to each user's email address.

Armed with that intelligence, you can dynamically target users based on their purchase, browsing and explored interests. Horizon-personalized content boosts clicks, pageviews and user engagement.

All you have to do is create a CNAME shared subdomain that points to horizon.sailthru.com, and drop a snippet of Javascript on the pages of your site. (Because this can be the last item before the closing </body> tag, pageload time should not be affected.)

Using metadata associated with your content, Horizon dynamically registers interest tags with a user's interest profile. Consider the following scenario, where a user browses the site of a major tech news site and also interacts frequently with their Sailthru-powered newsletter. Through each interaction, Horizon endlessly learns more about the user, denoting her clicks on articles about google, android and mobile-devices. There's no end to the tags or knowledge Horizon can gain about its users.

Horizon also gives an advantage to commerce sites by allowing them to target users based on purchase intent and history. Individual user profiles allows for dynamically generated content based on each user's profile and purchase history.

User interests are collected based on these tags and weighted compared to the overall interests of users across your site.

For each user and each tag, Sailthru stores a count and an interest level. Count is simply the raw count – the number of pageviews the user has had for that tag. Pageviews can only be calculated for sites containing the Horizon snippet on its pages. Interest level compares the user's count relative to other users across your site. Users with an interest score of two times the average user are considered to have high interest in that topic.

So what can you do with Horizon interest data?

• Gain intelligence about different groups of users. In the List Snapshot Report, you will see the top interests of users on that list – the topics with the largest numbers of high-interest users. This helps you gain insight into the interests of different types of users on your site and guide your editorial and marketing decisions.

• Generate personalized headlines. Given a number of pieces of tagged content, the horizon_select() function picks a smaller subset, ranked by relevance to that user. You can combine this with a data feed from your site to make a truly dynamic personalized newsletter. For a walkthrough on this, see Behavioral Headlines.

• Show pieces of content conditionally. Using the {select} or {if} control-structures combined with the horizon_interest() function, you can show pieces of content only if they are relevant to that user. For a walkthrough on this, see Conditional Content.

• Segment by groups of high-interest users. Using the List Generation feature, you can create lists of users who have demonstrated high interest in a particular topic. You could then send an email relevant to that interest only to those users.

Set Up Horizon on Your Site - Step-by-Step, we'll walk you through the simple process of adding the Horizon Javascript to your site.

Concierge - Set up Concierge, an on-site slider to present a single piece of suggested content

Scout - Set up Scout, Sailthru's on-site recommendation engine