Standard Cohorts

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Overview

Standard Cohorts are pre-built audience segments created by Permutive based on the IAB Audience Taxonomy. These standardized cohorts segment users according to common content categories that are consistent across all publishers, enabling universal targeting criteria for advertisers and agencies. Standard Cohorts leverage Watson Natural Language Understanding to automatically classify page content and assign users to appropriate audience segments based on their content engagement.

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Why Use Standard Cohorts?

Provide standardized targeting for advertisers — Standard Cohorts enable advertisers and agencies to target consistent audience segments across multiple publishers. By using the IAB Audience Taxonomy, these cohorts ensure that targeting criteria remain uniform regardless of which publisher properties are being used, simplifying campaign setup and execution. Enable programmatic audience activation — Standard Cohorts are specifically designed for programmatic advertising activation. They can be activated to SSPs and DSPs, allowing publishers to offer standardized audiences that are immediately available for buyer targeting without custom configuration. Leverage AI-powered content classification — Standard Cohorts use Watson Natural Language Understanding to automatically classify content and segment users, eliminating the need for manual tagging or categorization. This ensures accurate, consistent audience segmentation based on actual content consumption.

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Concepts

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Definitions

• Standard Cohort: A Permutive-defined audience segment built according to the IAB Audience Taxonomy. Standard Cohorts follow predefined rules and are applicable to all publishers who enable the feature.
• IAB Audience Taxonomy: The Interactive Advertising Bureau’s standardized taxonomy for categorizing audiences based on content interests. Permutive uses a subset of approximately 200 categories from the IAB Audience Taxonomy 1.1 to define Standard Cohorts.
• Watson Natural Language Understanding: IBM’s AI service that analyzes page content to generate hierarchical content categories. Permutive uses Watson to automatically classify articles and assign users to Standard Cohorts based on their content engagement.
• Standard Audiences: A broader feature built on Standard Cohorts that can include Watson-based Standard Cohorts, Affinity Cohorts, or publisher-mapped custom cohorts for programmatic activation.
• Standard Cohort Configuration: The process of enabling and customizing which Standard Cohorts are active for a publisher’s organization or workspace. Configuration can occur at any level of the organizational hierarchy.

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Workflows

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Enabling Standard Cohorts

To enable Standard Cohorts, publishers must contact Support to request initial setup. Standard Cohorts cannot be self-enabled—the initial configuration must be performed by Permutive. Once Permutive has completed the initial setup, publishers can enable and disable Standard Cohorts themselves through the Permutive Dashboard. Once enabled, the Permutive SDK automatically evaluates users against Standard Cohort criteria in real-time as they view content.

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Configuring Standard Cohorts for Enterprise Workspaces

If you require different Standard Cohort configurations for different business units, you must request this with Support. Once the workspace-specific configurations are in place, you can manage enabling and disabling Standard Cohorts at each configured level. When Standard Cohorts are configured at a specific workspace, users will be segmented into Standard Cohorts at that workspace and all its descendant workspaces. Ancestor workspaces (higher up in the hierarchy) will not be included in the segmentation.

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Guides

Configuring Standard Cohorts

Manage which Standard Cohorts are active and included in ad requests

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Environment Compatibility

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Core Product

Standard Cohorts functionality is supported on the following platforms:

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Dependencies

Standard Cohorts rely on the following products and features being configured:

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FAQ

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Changelog