Counting impressions of timed Target activity

[floriana_guardi]

We're setting up an activity that will display a pop-up after 30 seconds of browsing. The activity will also display only on selected pages, not site-wide.

Will Target count unique visitors of the activity as the people who actually saw the pop-up, or will it count also visitors who have not spend 30 seconds of browsing?

If it counts any visitor, would you recommend firing an impression event, or relying simply on a segment that filters visitors who have spent 30 seconds on the site? Or some other solution, like an Audience Manager audience?

[alexbishop · Accepted solution]

It sounds like a user qualifies for the activity and then within the activity there is some code that triggers the pop-up after 30 seconds. If that's understood correctly, then yes Target will count a visitor entering the activity as soon as they qualify for the activity, even if they don't reach the 30 second threshold. 

There's a couple of different options I can think of:
i) Handle the timer logic outside of Target and then make a request to Target after 30 seconds to retrieve the pop-up activity, at which point Target would count the visitor & display the pop-up at the same time
ii) As you mentioned, handle the timer logic within Target and then fire a custom event, which denotes an impression, when the pop-up is displayed

The benefit of i) is that you could use Target (or Analytics) in-built reporting to calculate conversion/lift etc because Visits/Visitors would actually represent those that saw the pop up. But you could still easily report on ii) by exporting the data and making the calculations offline