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Categories and tags are used widely across your site but their use can be a little confusing. Surely they both just do the same job?
In this article, we’re going to quickly run through how categories and tags work to highlight their differences and to (hopefully) do away with any confusion.
Categories: what are they and how are they used?
A category relates to a piece of content’s subject. They are used to bundle together related pieces of content to make it easier for users to find the information that helps answer their questions. They can also be used to give users access to a group of reports.
🔔 When creating categories there are a couple of key concepts you need to understand:
Top Level Categories – these describe the different master groups into which content can be grouped; this could be industry, sector, region, etc.
Sub Categories – these are the groups that flow out of the Top-Level Category to deliver an increasingly specific set of subjects.
Example
Imagine a user wants to find out about different types of Meals and has bought a subscription to the Meals category provided by a research organisation.
The top-level category in this example is 'Meals’. From this flows three subcategories ‘Breakfast’, ‘Lunch’, and ‘Dinner’. From each of these flows a series of further related categories to help create what we call a Category Tree.
It’s up to publishers to determine how many levels of Sub Categories they wish to add to each Category Tree flowing from a Top-Level Category, and how many Category Trees are required.
Of course, content doesn’t just have to be categorised under one Category Tree. In fact, it makes it easier for the user to drill down to increasingly specific information if content is categorised differently through relevant trees.
Imagine the same user wants to drill down to find information covering what people in France typically eat first thing in the morning. It would also be handy for all our Meals content to be categorised under a further Category Tree where the Top-Level Category was ‘Countries’, and the Sub Categories started with the UK, France, Italy, and so on.
🔔 The user could then filter their search by ‘Meals’, then ‘Breakfast’, then filter further by ‘Country’ and ‘France’ to drill down on the specific information they need.
Top tips
- Ideally, a piece of content should only be assigned to one category per Category Tree. After all, the principal subject of the report will relate most strongly to one category.
- Each report should belong to at least one category within a top level category. This is to minimise the chance of users choosing a filter that produces no results.
- Reports should be assigned at the deepest level possible. So, content about bacon sandwiches should be assigned to the ‘Hot’ category. The system will then also automatically attribute this content to higher categories (in this case, ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Meals’) for the sake of search.
- The depth of Category Trees changes from publisher to publisher, but typically three or four levels is sufficient depth.
- Selling bundled category groups is a great way to allow users access to multiple reports at once.
- It’s worth knowing that licenses can be granted along category lines, but not to specific cross matches. So, a user can’t just buy access to ‘French Breakfast’ content, but they can buy all of the Breakfast and all of France to access that content.
Tags: how are they different from categories?
For tags, it is important to think about this report ‘Has a …’
Categories relate to the principal subject of a piece of content and are used to organise and sell that research. Tags, however, are used to detail all the elements that are mentioned within the report.
Tags apply across all categories and, because a single report will mention many different topics, it’s likely to have multiple tags.
A report should only belong to one category per Category Tree, but the same tags can be used on multiple reports within the same Category Tree.
🔔 For convenience, tags are gathered in sets created by the publisher. Up to five tag sets can be created across a publisher’s entire portfolio. Grouping related tags together simply make them easier to find.
Example
Let’s look at our content around Meals again. To make it easier to find related content, a publisher might want to establish a tag set for ingredients (bacon, egg, sausage etc), one for condiments (ketchup, brown sauce, mustard), and perhaps one for cooking methods (baked, fried, grilled, preserved).
Organising tags in this way could help users easily locate research on the use of sausages in French breakfasts, simply by combining a mixture of tags and categories in their search filters.
So, you might ask, why not just have a category for Sausages? Wouldn’t that make it easier? Well, not in this context:
- Say for example we had a report 'Breakfast trends in France 2023 [bft2023FRA]'. We wouldn’t have a category for sausages as the report isn’t on sausages – it’s not a principal subject, so a category wouldn’t be useful or relevant.
- Mention of sausages can apply across multiple pieces of content in our Meal and Country categories, so it’s important to be able to link these pieces with related content.
Top tips
- Initially, a publisher might not have distinct tag sets in mind. In this case, the best practise is to create a tag set called ‘Tags’ that you can add terms to – and then refine - as you go along.
- Publishers can create unlimited aliases for tags. For example, ‘frankfurter’ can be added as an alias for ‘sausage’ – so, if a user searches for frankfurter, they will also get results containing the word sausage or vice versa.
- Using tags is a great way to keep a list of all the organisations that get mentioned across a content suite.
- Publishers cannot license content by tags in the same way they can by categories.
Next Steps
Now you know the difference between categories and tags, take a look at the articles below to create them!