Tips & Tricks: Working with Complex Targeting Conditions

One of the most frequent questions we get in Customer Success, is “why is this campaign rendering when it shouldn’t?” The most common solution is fixing the targeting conditions defined.

Read on to understand how to better use negative conditions (does not include, is not…) and get the anticipated outcome.

What is Targeting

Targeting campaigns allows you to serve relevant content to groups of users with common values, based on a given criteria. The wide selection of targeting conditions to choose from makes it easy to achieve nearly any level of personalization you desire.
For example: iPhone users, people who purchased twice in the past 30 days, people who have added items to cart in the current session, New York residents, morning browsers, etc.

Why negative targeting stands out

Targeting conditions are generally expected to stand on their own. However, when you add negative conditions and logic, things get more complex.

Let's learn how to use complex targeting conditions effectively

Difference between AND & OR

• AND - when we have “and” between conditions, both need to be true in order for the experience to be served. This means less users will be targeted
• OR - when we have “or” between conditions, any one of the conditions needs to be true. This means more users will be targeted

Read on for some examples...

Let’s see how conditions with AND behave together, as we target mobile users AND people from New York City.

And now let’s see how conditions with OR behave together, as we target mobile users OR people from New York City.

Now let’s check negative conditions, for example: not mobile AND not New York City.

Same goes for targeting by negative conditions with OR. For example: not mobile OR not New York City.

It becomes even less intuitive when we target not New York OR not Chicago, as it will result in serving the experience to all users:

Additional Resources

• Click here to read more about Targeting Conditions