Audience Hub

An audience is a group of users who share a common attribute (behavior, location, user properties, and so on). Audiences are based on long-term attributes, as opposed to targeting conditions that can capture user actions in a given timeframe, and are real-time and session-based. 

You can create and save these audiences, and use them to: 

• Target experiences (for example, show a promotion for your new shoe collection to users who purchased shoes in the past).
• Target recommendation strategies (for example, build a unique strategy for users who are repeat purchasers). 
• Break down report data (for example, view the results of an A/B test broken down by mobile users vs. desktop users). This is a great way to identify hidden personalization opportunities where a particular audience shows a preference for one variation over another.
• Export to a third-party platform using the Audiences Anywhere app (for example, export email addresses of users interested in shoes so that you can target them in your email platform).

 

Audience types

When you create a new audience (Audience Hub › Audience Manager › Create Audience), you can select from the following audience types:

• User Attributes: This is the broadest audience type, and is constructed based on any combination of logic and attributes. 
• Campaign Traffic: This audience type enables you to include users in the appropriate audience from the first moment they enter your site, based on the acquisition campaign that brought them to your site. 

User Attributes audiences

Build audiences by creating a set of conditions. These conditions can be based on the user's past behavior, technology, geography, and more.

To create a User Attributes audience:

• Go to Audience › Audience Manager and select Create Audience.
• Select the User Attributes.
• Select Conditions that define your audience (for example, country is France). You can add multiple conditions to define the audience using: 
  • OR – to expand the definition (for example, country is France or Spain), so users can match either one of the conditions.
  • AND – to refine the definition (for example, country is France and device category is mobile), so users must match both conditions.
  For a full list of the conditions, see Audience Conditions.
• Set the timeframe for the conditions to be met (AKA lookback window).
• In Advanced Settings you can modify how long a user remains in the audience after they stop matching the audience condition.
  

  Note: This setting is ignored if conditions are transient in their nature, including:

  • The condition contains “At most”, “less than” or “exactly” in its definition.
  • The condition is based on a user data feed (CRM).
  • The condition is an affinity condition.
• Click Save Audience. Users who currently meet the conditions are immediately assigned to the audience. 

Campaign Traffic audiences

With Campaign Traffic audiences, you can assign users to audiences based on the campaigns they have been targeted to. For example, assign users to "Women" traffic, if they arrived through a campaign that was targeted to women on Facebook Ads. This enables you to serve personalized experiences – even on the first pageview – as well as capture data from ads and social networks.

To create a Campaign Traffic audience:

1. In Audience › Audience Manager › Create Audience, select Campaign Traffic.
2. In the Create Audience screen, give your audience a name, and optionally add notes and labels. 
   
3. Select the parameters to use to build your audience. You can select either or both of the following:
   • DYA (Dynamic Yield Audience) parameter:
     A unique parameter connected to this audience. After creating the audience, you can send your acquisition team this URL parameter, and guide them to add it to every campaign that is targeted to users who should be part of this audience. For example, create an audience of Men, receive a unique DYA parameter, and guide your acquisition team to add this parameter to every campaign targeted to men on Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and so on. When users click on the ads, they arrive at the site and belong to this audience on the first pageview.
     To make it easy for the acquisition team to know what to do, you can send an instruction email after you save the audience.
   • UTM parameters:
     Use the UTM parameters the acquisition team is probably already using to "tag" their campaigns to segment users.
     Select from the list of existing values (and see how many users visited with each value in the last 30 months), or add new values.
4. Click Save Audience.
   If you select the DYA parameter, the Send instructions by email dialog appears. This is a message you can customize, to let your acquisition team know about parameters to include in campaigns.  
   
   The new audience is added to the Audience table. 

Out-of-the-box audiences

The following audiences are included in your account when it's created:

All of these audiences are of the User Attributes type.

Primary audiences

You can mark up to 4 audiences as primary audiences, which means they always appear first, and in the Audience Manager, include a summary card for easy access and an overview of information. 

Primary audiences are designed to help you scale and optimize your personalization program. We recommend selecting those groups of users that mean the most to your business and that cover the majority of your traffic. This makes it easier to target those audiences later or to immediately see the results of any A/B test for each group. Note that this doesn't mean you can't target users or audiences on a more granular level when necessary. 

Check out our Rooted Personalization Hub for additional reading about primary audiences. 

Audience Manager

The Audience Manager is the portal to all your information and actions related to audiences, including:

• View and create primary audiences.
• Click an audience name to view the audience report.
• View data for each audience, such as the audience conversion rate and revenue per user. Notice that while users enter audiences in real-time, the reports are updated once a day overnight and are not rendered in real-time.
• In the Used By column, see where your audiences are being used across Experience OS. Click the number of entities employing the audience to view a list of connected experiences, strategies, or audiences, and manage them.

Editing audiences

When you hover over the audience row, the options to edit or view the audience report appear.

Click the edit icon to update the audience information:

Click the more options icon for additional actions:

Audience Explorer

If you're not sure which audience to create, you can go to the Audience Explorer and use the audience conditions to get immediate estimation about a group of users without having to create an audience. By setting the conditions, you can see the segment size, performance (conversion rate, AOV), and properties (device-type breakdown, geolocation). The report can be filtered by the following timeframe: Yesterday, Past 7 Days, and Past 30 Days. Note that the reporting doesn't not include data from today.

You can compare your results to any existing audience using the Compare to dropdown, and select the audience you want to compare to. 

If you like your results, click Create Audience to create a new audience with the conditions you specified.

Saved audiences and their reports are accessible from Audiences › Audience Manager.

Note that audiences defined by conditions that must be met within the current session do not yield projected information.