Train your knowledge

Setting up audiences to segment your visitors

Audiences are the foundation of personalization in Unless. They let you group visitors by who they are, what they do, and where they come from, so you can deliver different experiences to different people without building separate workflows for each case. A new visitor from a paid ad has different needs than a returning customer logged into their account, and audiences let you treat them accordingly.

This guide walks you through the core concepts, the available targeting conditions, and the practical steps to set up your first audiences.

What makes a good audience?

Before you start building, think about whether an audience is worth creating. Two questions matter most.

What’s the reach? An audience should have high reach, defined by either volume or value. Volume means the audience comprises a large percentage of your site’s visitors, like a “mobile visitors” audience if 60% of your traffic is mobile. Value means the audience comprises visitors who are extremely valuable, like an “enterprise leads” audience from high-value campaigns. Avoid audiences that are too small. A “visitors from LinkedIn” audience that only makes up 1% of your overall traffic won’t generate meaningful impact.

Is this feasible? You must be able to identify members of this audience. Unless is not a crystal ball and doesn’t magically know everything about your visitors. Creating audiences based on gender, age, job title, or interest can be valuable, but the data has to come from somewhere. Ask yourself: can this audience be identified using the data and conditions provided by Unless, or can I provide the necessary data myself through UTMs, cookies, or the API?

Audience types

Unless provides two types of audiences:

Default audiences: Five pre-defined visitor segments available immediately: Everyone, New visitors, Returning visitors, Visitors using a desktop device, and Visitors using a mobile device.
Custom audiences: Visitor groups you compose yourself by mixing and matching targeting conditions.

Targeting conditions

Unless offers three types of targeting conditions: context, behavior, and profile. You can mix and match all available conditions using AND/OR logic.

Context targeting

Define audiences based on environmental factors:

Geolocation: Localize content based on country, state, city, zip code, IP, or currency
Time: Show content based on when someone visits (for example, weekend visitors, outside office hours, holiday shoppers)
Device: Target based on device type or browser

Behavior targeting

Target based on visitor actions and session data:

Behavior: Buttons clicked, pages viewed, PDFs downloaded - use this information to understand what visitors want
Session: Target based on session duration or number of pages viewed
Parameter: Use URL parameters and UTMs to translate campaign data into hyper-targeted experiences. For example, dynamically change landing page headlines based on the ad someone clicked.

Profile targeting

Target based on visitor attributes:

Default traits: Email and identifier (available by default)
Custom traits: Personal visitor attributes such as name, gender, email, job, purchases (sourced through the API)
Firmographic enrichment: Based on IP address (contact Unless for setup)

Step-by-step setup

Step 1: Choose your targeting conditions

Open “Train > Audiences > Create audience”. Set your conditions, pick the logic (AND or OR), and set the membership duration.

Step 2: Configure AND/OR conditions

The and/or logic determines how many conditions must apply for a visitor to become part of an audience:

Operator	How it works	Best for
Or	If any condition applies, the visitor joins the audience (regardless of other conditions)	Creating broader visitor groups
And	All conditions must apply for the visitor to join the audience	Creating narrower, more specific audiences

Remember to use these correctly. For example, your variation can target users from two referral sources, but a user can only be referred from one page at a time. So, use the “OR” function to combine those triggers.

Step 3: Set membership duration

The membership duration defines how long a visitor remains part of an audience. Align this with your sales cycle. For a freelancer ad campaign, for instance, you might identify visitors as freelancers only for their current web session, or use a longer period (for example, 30 days) where a cookie recognizes returning visitors as freelancers for the specified duration.

Behavior-based targeting in detail

Behavioral data is especially powerful because visitors tell you what they want through their actions. Here are the key options:

New vs. Returning Visitor: This condition uses a session-based membership. A visitor who returns to your website is a returning visitor, regardless of how much time has passed. Note that Unless cannot identify users who were on your page before you installed the Unless script.
Page Referrer: Target visitors who land on the page through a referral website, e.g. LinkedIn. The trigger “is empty” can be used in the opposite way to create a variation targeted at all direct traffic. Remember that for many websites, there are several different referrers (e.g. LinkedIn → m.linkedin.com, linkedin.com, l.linkedin.com), so it’s best to check your Analytics and define the condition using “contains”.
Current Page (Path): Target visitors who have visited specific pages. The condition triggers the moment a person visits the page you defined, and they remain in your audience for the duration of the membership.
Landing Page (Path): Target visitors who have entered your website through a specific page.
Current Domain: Mostly used to create excluding audiences. For example, create an audience for “current domain contains blog.mysite.com” to exclude everyone who entered your website through the Blog from seeing experiences.
Cookie: Target visitors for whom a specific cookie has (not) been set by your application. You can even create new cookies.
Event: Set up an audience based on the occurrence of a page event, like a login event. This requires some developer help, as you need to start tracking the event by adding a JavaScript statement to the page.

Working with cookies

For security and performance reasons, your website doesn’t send cookies to Unless by default. To create an audience based on a cookie, you need to whitelist the cookie in your account settings. Also, the browser cookie can’t be set to httpOnly, since Unless won’t be able to read the cookie or send it to its servers.

You have two options: target based on the existence of a cookie (behavior > cookie > is set > nameofyourcookie) or the value of a cookie (nameofyourcookie=value).

Self-segmentation

Sometimes you just don’t have enough data about your visitors. Instead of waiting for subtle signals of intent, you can simply ask. Self-segmentation lets you survey visitors with a single question and group them into audiences based on their answer.

To set this up, first make sure you have the necessary audiences in Unless. Under targeting conditions, select Behavior, then Self-segmentation. Give your audience a defining name and choose a generous membership duration (e.g. 30 days) to better understand how your website traffic is composed. Then, in your component, enable the buttons and select the audience each button should assign the visitor to.

Audience order and verification

Unless checks your audiences in descending order. If the visitor doesn’t match the first audience, it checks the second, then the third, and so on. If a visitor doesn’t fit into any audience, they’ll see the non-optimized, default version of your website. This first-match-wins logic means you can place an exclusion audience above others to skip them.

To verify your audience is working, check your audience size in the Unless dashboard, preview experiences as different audience members, and monitor analytics to see audience membership and engagement.

Common mistakes

Mistake	Why it hurts	Solution
Audiences that are too small	Not enough visitors to generate impact	Target visitors making up at least 10% of traffic or focus on high-value segments
Missing data sources	Audience can’t be identified	Verify data availability (UTMs, API, cookies) before creating the audience
Overly complex conditions	Difficult to manage and troubleshoot	Start simple, add complexity only when needed

How many audiences do I need?

There’s no magic number. Start with 2-3 broad audiences. Once you understand how they work and see results, create additional ones. Review your Analytics data to identify which audiences to prioritize. Note that Flex plans cap at 5 audiences, while Fixed plans are unlimited.

Conclusion

Audiences turn raw visitor data into actionable segments. Start with a few broad groups, verify they work, and refine from there. The key is to align your audiences with your sales cycle, use the right conditions, and always check that you have the data to identify your visitors in the first place.