Browse the categories below to find answers to frequently asked questions about mtribes.
Q: What is mtribes?
A: mtribes is a SaaS platform for real-time audience experience control, targeting and insights. mtribes can help you identify how your audience engages with your service, create personalized customer experiences and measure the results of performance and activity.
Q: Who are the typical users of mtribes?
A: We expect content operators and marketers will use mtribes on a daily basis - to segment audiences, personalize digital experiences, experiment with UX and traffic allocation, and learn from real-time insights.
To set mtribes up, a developer will need to model a template of their app in mtribes. Then using our CLI, generate code for their specific platforms and integrate with mtribes. Once this is done, the content operator or marketer can take control of their app using the mtribes interface.
Q: What type of analytics do you capture?
A: mtribes is not intended to replace your BI platform but rather augment it with highly targeted metrics around user and feature engagement. At a base level, this includes metrics for Tribe activity and Experiences being served.
Custom events can be sent via the SDK to track and monitor any customer-specific metrics of interest, e.g. item/offer clicked, video viewed, and purchase completed.
Q: What is the difference between using contextual properties and labels?
A: Contextual properties are transient.
They are only available within the current device session and may vary per device. They can be changed mid-session, so there is no point in storing them long-term. This way, we also avoid storing potentially sensitive GDPR related data in our system.
However, while the value of the contextual property is not retained, the aggregated historical data for Tribe rules is retained for calculating 30-day Tribe activity metrics (e.g. number of customers who matched a specific value).
User labels (tags) are persistent.
The Management API will allow them to be set against a User ID across all sessions. They cannot be changed mid-session.
Q: What types of audience data can I use when creating Tribes?
A: mtribes lets you create Tribes based on audience attributes, behaviors, and contextual properties.
Your apps can send contextual properties at runtime against a particular user for example Campaign ID or Currency, Tribes can be created based on rules matching these contextual properties.
Q: What does the any/all filter do?
A: The any/all filter is the difference between very specific and very broad personalization. When switched to any, your Tribe will include customers who meet any of the filters selected. When switched to all, your Tribe will only consist of audience members that meet all criteria.
For example, the results of a campaign delivered to a Tribe of visitors that match all filters device is desktop and last seen less than 3 days ago and continent is North America, will differ vastly to targeting any customer that uses a desktop, anyone who has been seen less than 3 days ago and who were in North America in their last user session.
Q: How do I control content within mtribes?
A: mtribes isn't a Content Management System (CMS) and doesn't ingest content, so you can't directly manage content in the platform. Instead, mtribes lets you control the configuration of your content in your application.
For example:
You have a component in your app that loads in a list of content. With mtribes, you can model this component (or 'Experience' in mtribes) and configure the properties (List ID or URL etc.) to control when and who it gets served to.
Q: How do I target audiences on a particular device or platform?
A: mtribes lets you create audience groups called Tribes based on a specific device or platform.
When configuring a Tribe, select the device or platform rule and match this to the device or platform of interest. Combine multiple device or platform rules as needed (e.g. audience on iOS and a tablet device).
Once the Tribe is created, you can target it with personalized Experience Scenarios.
Q: How do I target audiences in a particular location?
A: mtribes lets you create audience groups called Tribes based on a particular location or set of locations.
When configuring your Tribe, select the location rule and match this to the location (country, state, city, etc.) of interest. If you want the Tribe to contain multiple locations, create multiple rules matching each of the locations needed.
Once the Tribe is created, you can target it with personalized Experience Scenarios.
Q: What happens if my app loses connectivity with the mtribes server?
A: mtribes has been developed with the end user experience in mind, even in times of connectivity issues. Experience fallbacks have been built into the generated code. The default Scenario on an Experience provides this fallback state.
If the default Scenario on an Experience is switched off, the Experience will not show as a fallback. If switched on, the Experience will display with the properties set within that default Scenario.
Q: What SDKs do you support?
A: Javascript, Native iOS and Android SDKs are currently available.
Our SDKs are built to be universal for their respective mobile and TV platforms on each tech stack. The iOS SDK will support tvOS, and the Android SDK will support Fire and Android TV.
We're working on a Roku SDK, and on several server-side SDKs including NodeJS (for customers building server-side rendered web apps).
Q: Do I need to update my app if I make changes in mtribes?
A: You do not need to update your app for day-to-day scheduling in mtribes. This is one of the platform's key advantages. Once your app is integrated with mtribes, schedulers can dynamically control and personalize Experiences without relying on developers.
You do need to update your app if you make changes to the Experience template, because the template in mtribes may become unsynchronized with your app. In this case, we suggest using the mtribes CLI to easily update and regenerate the code, and reintegrate it with your app.
Q: What happens if my app loses connectivity with the mtribes server?
A: mtribes has been developed with the end user experience in mind, even in times of connectivity issues. Experience fallbacks have been built into the generated code. The default Scenario on an Experience provides this fallback state.
If the default Scenario on an Experience is switched off, the Experience will not show as a fallback. If switched on, the Experience will display with the properties set within that default Scenario.