What is an Expression/Action Pair?
For the latest version of Commerce Server 2007 Help, see the Microsoft Web site.
After you create your target expressions, you can combine them with action types to form an expression/action pair. You can specify the following action types:
Target. If the expression evaluates to "True," the score is increased, as is the probability that the content will be shown. If the expression evaluates to "False," the score is not changed. In both scenarios, the content is eligible for delivery.
Require. If the expression evaluates to "True," the content is eligible for delivery. If the expression evaluates to "False," the content is not eligible for delivery.
Exclude. If the expression evaluates to "True," the content is not eligible for delivery. If the expression evaluates to "False," the content is eligible for delivery.
Sponsor. If the expression evaluates to "True," the content is eligible for delivery and no other content is eligible unless it too has an expression with action = Sponsor. (Sponsor has only one multiplier.) For example, if Microsoft sponsors an ad on a home page, only Microsoft advertisements are displayed. However, if there were more advertisements from other companies sponsoring the home page, those ads would also be eligible for display.
A displayable campaign item can have one or more expression/action pairs associated with it. For example, if you want to target an advertisement to males, and especially males in the state of Washington, you could set up two expression/action pairs. The first would have a targeting expression for males and an action type of Require. The second would have a targeting expression for "state = Washington" and a target action of Target. This makes sure that your advertisement is only shown to males, and will have a higher weight when being selected for males from Washington.
A site developer can change the values of the multipliers Commerce Server provides. You may want to do this to give expressions with one action type a greater priority than expressions with a different action type.
See Also
Other Resources
How to Create a Catalog Expression
How to Create a Target Expression