Score Key
Lincx will choose the top scoring Ads to display within a Zone as described in the Ad Scoring section here. The score-key option on the Zone script though will give you more fine-tuned control over how the Ads get scored.
Since the score of each Ad is scoped to the Zone by default, the Zone ID is the only criteria accounted for when scoring an Ad. As a result, Ads are compared against each other based on their performance in a given Zone. However, the Publisher may have very different looking audiences arriving at the same zone from different traffic sources or channels. In this case, Ad Scoring may be over-generalizing for that zone. What if we want to score ads based upon audience and not just Zone?
This is where the use of the score-key can come into play. To keep the scores for an Ad scoped to each distinct traffic source or audience, you can simply pass a Sub ID (that identifies the traffic source) as the value of the score-key in the script for the Zone.
As an example, if we have a Zone set up where the sub id for the traffic source is set to s1 it would be expected to look like this:
<script
src="https://api.lincx.com/load"
data-zone-id="abc123"
data-s1="Z">
</script>
But to add the traffic source as the score-key, the script tag requires an update to add data-score-key="Z" and would look like this when the visitor is from a traffic source with a sub id of Z:
<script
src="https://api.lincx.com/load"
data-zone-id="abc123"
data-s1="Z"
data-score-key="Z">
</script>
As a result, Ads will now be scored based on their performance for a particular traffic source in the Zone regardless of their performance in across traffic sources. In short, when Score Key is implemented, optimization is moved from the Zone level down to the audience level.