Creating Audiences

An audience is a group of users who share a common attribute (behavior, location, user properties, and so on). 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).
• Break down report data (for example, view the results of an A/B test broken down by mobile users vs. desktop users).
• Export to a third-party platform (for example, export email addresses of users who are interested in shoes, so you can target them in your email platform).

Audience types

When you create a new audience (Audience › Audience Manager › Create Audience) you can choose 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 time they enter your site, and serve them a personalized experience beginning with their very first interaction. 

User Attributes audiences

Build audiences by building 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:

  • 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 into 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 allows you to serve personalized experiences – even on the first pageview – as well as capturing 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 are likely 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 selected DYA parameter, the Send instructions by email dialog appears. This is a message that 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 already exist in your account when it is created: 

• Referral Traffic
• Paid Search Traffic
• Search Traffic
• Direct Traffic
• Social Traffic
• Desktop Users
• Tablet Users
• Mobile Users
• Purchased in the Past Month (for eCommerce only)
• Purchased in the Past Year (for eCommerce only)

Audience reports

The audience report enables you to learn about the size of the audience, its impact on your business metrics, and the behavior of users in the audience. While users enter audiences in real time, the reports are not real-time and are updated once per day.

To view an audience report, go to Audience › Audience Manager and click an audience. 

Report metrics

Different metrics appear for different verticals. You can customize some of the metrics that are displayed in Settings › General Settings › Primary Metrics. To learn more, see Customized Dashboard and Audience Reports Top Metrics. 

Audience Explorer

If you're not sure which audience to create, you can go to the "Audience Explorer" and use the conditions to get immediate information 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) based on a given timeframe.

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.