How to use the IAB Audience Taxonomy
For the purpose of consistency, Arc XP has add support for the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) audience taxonomy to its Audience Insights application. Keeping things consistent enables a publisher to collect information about its individual audience members in a format that is easily shared with other systems that can personalize a visitor’s experience on the publisher’s news platform(s).
Arc XP has chosen to implement IAB’s audience as key-value pairs where the keys consists of the IDs defined by IAB, and the values governed by rules defined by Arc XP.
Rules for storing values
Not allowed
For some IAB keys/ids it does not make sense to store a value. An example of this is ID 1 (Demographic) which is the parent ID for all demographic keys.
One value allowed
For some IAB keys it is allowed to store one of its ‘child’ IDs as its value. Take key/id 2 (Demographic | Age Range) as an example. For this key all the allowed values are its ‘children’ keys, representing the various age ranges. Key=3 (18-20), key=4 (21-24) etc. Since a person can only fall into one of the age ranges, the Audience Insights IAB API replaces the value of key 2 with any key from its list of children when that API is called multiple times.
Multiple values allowed
Some IAB keys will allow multiple ‘child’ IDs as values, and these will be separated by a comma in the database. The example here is key 207 (Interest | Academic Interests) for which a person may indicate both 211 (History) and 213 (Philosophy).
Freeform text
Some IAB IDs are listed in the specification as accepting a text string rather than another ID(key) from the specification. An example is IAB ID 55 (Country) where the specification indicates that valid values from ISO-3166-1-alpha-3 are allowed. Here the Audience Insights API will validate the input with a three character regular expression.
REST APIs
The Audience Insights application offers to following APIs for managing IAB key-value pairs.
Browse IAB Tree
| HTTP Method | Path | Description |
|---|---|---|
| GET | /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab/:id/children | This anonymous API allows you to browse the IAB audience taxonomy by passing the ID of the node for which you wish to view its children. |
| POST | /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab | Add a new IAB key to the signed in caller’s Audience Insights account. |
| GET | /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab | Get all IAB records stored on the signed in caller’s Audience Insights account. |
| DELETE | /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab/:id | Remove the requested IAB value from the signed in caller’s Audience Insights account. |
IAB SDK Methods
Before utilizing these methods, see Audience Insights: Getting Started for more information on setting up the SDK. Our SDK methods serve as wrappers, making it easier for developers to interact with our APIs.
The following table lists the SDK methods and the corresponding APIs they wrap.
| SDK Method | API |
|---|---|
| setIABField(key, value) | POST /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab |
| deleteIABField(id) | DELETE /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab/${Number(id)} |
| getIABChildren(id) | GET /identity/public/v2/extprofile/iab/${Number(id)}/children |