The iOS 15 update, that was released in September 2021, gives users the option to block the tracking of email opens in the iOS, MacOS or iPadOS Mail app. This also affects segmentation based on geolocation. For more information on the iOS 15 updates, see What is happening?
In most (though not all) cases, Emarsys can identify the city where a response was recorded. In the Geolocation Criteria feature you can select a location, city, country or region anywhere in the world and create a segment of the contacts who responded within that area during the selected time period.
- Timeframe – Here you select the timeframe for the responses.
- Target group – Emarsys initially treats every contact as a visitor to a given location until their behavior has become regular enough to identify one location as their home. This categorization is dependent entirely on their responses and has nothing to do with any database fields (e.g. City, State, Country or region). These categories are constantly evaluated and updated by our algorithms after every response.
You can select a country or region by entering its name in the Location field. Once you are done, the country or region will be highlighted on the map.
You can select a city either by planting a marker on the map with your mouse, or by entering an address in the Location field.
The map automatically zooms in or out, if necessary, to show the selected location.
This is an integration with Google Maps so any address can be entered. However, only the city, country or region will be used by Emarsys geolocation. Segments within a city are not possible.
While Emarsys can precisely select countries by their borders, for cities and other locations, you have to define a radius. The radius is measured from the city center or the location marker and creates the area in which responses are identified. You can choose your unit of distance (miles or kilometers) during account setup and modify it on your My Profile page. The minimum radius is 25km; there is no maximum radius.
Click Calculate Contacts to show how many contacts in the selected target group have been identified for your location.
You can only use one set of geolocation criteria per segment, but within that you can define as many locations as you like.
Notes:
- All locations within a segment are linked with the OR operator. If you want to use the AND operator, you should create two segments and combine them.
- Proxy opens (i.e. opens received from proxies) are excluded from the calculations when determining the geolocation of contacts.
Home location calculation
The iOS 15 update, that was released in September 2021, gives users the option to block the tracking of email opens in the iOS, MacOS or iPadOS Mail app. This also affects segmentation based on geolocation. For more information on the iOS 15 updates, see What is happening?
Geolocation segmentation calculates the home location of contacts based on their interactions and takes more recent locations into consideration with more weight.
The calculation is made up of the following steps:
1. The platform filters for the daily unique locations of a contact.
Example: The contact has one open and two click events from London and one open event from Luton for a given day. We register one visit to London, and one visit to Luton for that day.
2. The platform aggregates the number of visits on a weekly basis.
Example: The contact has four visits to London and one visit to Luton in a specific week. In this case, London will be set as the contacts home location.
3. Events are weighed based on how long ago they happened. Each event that happened in the past month counts as 1, events that happened between 1-2 months ago count as 0.66 and events that happened 2-3 months ago count as 0,66 * 0,66 etc.
Example: The contact has two visits in London this week and three visits in Luton two months ago. After weighing the number of visits, the contact has two visits from London and 3*0.66 = two visits from Luton. As this would result in a tie, the city where the most recent activity was captured will be set as the home location. In this case, the contacts home location will be set to London.
4. Visits to cities within 25km of each other are aggregated for each location increasing the importance of that area in the calculation.
Example: Two visits to London and one visit to Wembley are registered as three visits to London and three visits to Wembley, as these cities are close to each other.
5. The system selects the country or region with the largest aggregate number of visits as the home country or region. If two countries have the same result, the country or region with the more recent visit is chosen.
6. The system selects the city with the largest aggregate number of visits in the home country or region as the home city. If two cities have the same result, the city with the more recent visit is chosen.