Tips & Tricks: Make a Personalised First Impression with New Campaign Traffic Audiences

Hi there,

How often do you cross-collaborate with your acquisition team to align your web personalisation efforts with their offsite campaign plans? If your answer is an awkward *throat-clearing* noise, then you’re not alone. Cross-team collaboration can be tricky to conjure, and the onsite (owned) and offsite (paid or earned) worlds are often poorly connected. A social media behemoth like Instagram (re: Facebook) undoubtedly knows enough details about a given user's likes and dislikes to serve up relevant ads, but once that user leaves the Metaverse and lands on the website, that data is lost. This can be a frustrating outcome for both the user and the marketer: the customer journey is reset to that of an ‘unknown’ state, leading to missed signals that could have otherwise been used to tailor their onsite experience.

Enable your team to personalise the customer journey from the first pageview by creating and targeting Campaign Traffic Audiences. This new Audience feature in DY enables you to create Audiences based on URL parameters from paid, or owned, media campaigns, which act as a proxy for those valuable signals your team uses to target offsite campaigns. Have an Instagram ad campaign targeted at followers of a certain influencer, who are female and aged between 25-35? Simply use either an existing ad campaign tracking parameter or generate a custom DYA parameter to the landing page URL of that targeted segment. Written in collaboration with one of our talented Customer Success Managers, Liz Powell, these tips will give you use case inspiration for leveraging this latest DY feature.

Use Case: Personalise Experiences to Visitors from a "Summer Sale" Ad Campaign

Serve users of different demographics who arrive on your site from a seasonal ad campaign with personalised content by leveraging Campaign Traffic Audiences. Assume that your paid media team is targeting that ad campaign to men and women with different ads on various social media platforms. Additionally, let's assume that the email team has launched a corresponding campaign from your ESP. Both the ad campaign and the email campaign use the utm_campaign parameters men_summer_sale and women_summer_sale.

Use Case Requirements: To roll out this use case, you should either have a solid understanding of UTM/URL parameters used by offsite marketing campaigns, and/or an understanding of how to implement DYA unique campaign parameters in the URLs of offsite marketing campaigns.

Use Case Setup Pt. I: Create the Audience

Start by creating a new Campaign Traffic Audience in DY. Navigate to the Audience Manager page, click the Create Audience button, and then select Campaign Traffic. Then, build your new Campaign Traffic Audience with the following steps:

1. On the Create Audience screen, give your new Audience a name and then add any relevant notes and labels:

2. OPTION A.) If you know the UTM parameter used in the campaigns, select the UTM parameters checkbox. From the dropdown, choose the relevant parameter and select the corresponding value (you can choose multiple parameters if needed):

OPTION B.) Select the DYA parameter checkbox to generate a custom parameter if you don’t already have a specific UTM parameter. You'll be able to easily share the DYA parameter that you create with your team members who are running the off-site campaigns:

Note: Once you save the Audience, the system will automatically generate instructions that your acquisition team can use to easily add the parameters to the relevant URLs.

3. Specify a "lookback" window, or duration of time during which a user would be added to the Audience if they visited the site with the parameters you specified. Then, click Save Audience. If you chose to create a DYA parameter, a popup window will appear for you to conveniently send instructions about the parameter to your team:

Note: Once your new Audience is saved/created, the number of users in the Audience will initially be 0. The user count should increase after a day or so.

4. Repeat these steps to create as many different Campaign Traffic Audiences as needed.

Use Case Setup Pt. II: Target an Experience with Personalised Content

After you have created your Campaign Traffic Audiences, you can then set up DY web campaigns with personalised Experiences targeted to each relevant Audience (note: the following steps will basically be the same regardless of the campaign type you choose to build):

1. Create a new DY web campaign and specify the campaign-level settings.

2. Add an Experience per-Audience, and target the relevant Campaign Traffic Audience to each:

3. Add a Variation to the Experience and choose a template. Be sure to personalise the design, messaging, etc., of each Variation to the given Audience that you've targeted with the overall Experience. The content of the Variation should be personalised enough to have an impact on the test:

4. Save the Variation. If you'd like to configure and run an A/B test for the Experience, specify the relevant A/B test settings and create an additional Variation(s) to allocate to users that are exposed to the Experience.

5. Set the Experience Status to Active, save the Experience, and publish the campaign.

Once you've created personalised Experiences targeted to each of relevant Campaign Traffic Audience, be sure to arrange the Experiences in your preferred order of priority in case of user overlap between Audience segments. We also encourage you to create a "fallback"/default Experience targeted to All Users and set at the lowest priority. This way, users who do not qualify for any of the targeted Experiences in the campaign will still be served with something from the overall campaign, enabling you to test more generalized content for such users.

Until next time,
Ashley & Liz