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Setting up audiences to segment your visitors

Setting up audiences to segment your visitors is a powerful way to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with different groups of users. By grouping visitors based on their behavior, context, or profile data, you can tailor your website content, messaging, and interactions to meet their specific needs and increase engagement. This article will guide you through the process of creating effective audiences in Unless, explain key concepts, and share best practices to help you get started.

understanding audiences and their importance

Audiences are segments of visitors who share common characteristics or behaviors. Instead of treating all visitors the same, audiences allow you to customize experiences for groups such as new visitors, returning customers, or users from specific campaigns. Unless provides two main types of audiences:

• Default audiences: Pre-built segments like everyone, new visitors, returning visitors, desktop users, and mobile users.
• Custom audiences: Segments you create by combining targeting conditions based on context, behavior, and profile data.

Effective audience segmentation helps you address the diverse needs of your visitors, improving relevance and conversion rates.

choosing targeting conditions for your audiences

When creating custom audiences, you select targeting conditions that define who belongs in each group. Unless offers three categories of targeting conditions:

context targeting

This involves environmental factors related to the visitor’s situation, such as:

• Geolocation: Country, city, IP address, or currency.
• Time: Specific days, hours, or holidays.
• Device: Type of device or browser used.

behavior targeting

Behavioral data reflects what visitors do on your site, including:

• Page views: Which pages or PDFs they have visited or downloaded.
• Referrer: The website or campaign that brought them to your site.
• Session data: Number of pages viewed or session duration.
• Events: Custom actions like logging in or clicking buttons.
• Cookies: Whether specific cookies are set or their values.

profile targeting

Profile data relates to who the visitor is, often sourced from your CRM or enrichment services:

• Default traits: Email or unique identifier.
• Custom traits: Job title, purchases, or other personal attributes.
• Firmographic data: Company information based on IP address.

creating and configuring audiences

To set up an audience in Unless, follow these steps:

1. Select targeting conditions: Choose one or more conditions from context, behavior, or profile categories. For example, you might create an audience of visitors who came from LinkedIn (behavior > page referrer contains “linkedin”) or users who have a cookie indicating they are logged in.

2. Combine conditions with AND/OR logic: Use AND to require all conditions to be true, or OR to include visitors who meet any condition. For example, to target visitors from two different referral sources, use OR.

3. Set membership duration: Define how long a visitor remains in the audience after qualifying. This could be a single session or several days or weeks, depending on your sales cycle and goals.

4. Name your audience: Choose a clear, descriptive name to easily identify the segment.

5. Save and publish: Once configured, save your audience and use it to target personalized experiences.

examples of behavior-based audiences

• New vs. returning visitors: Create a session-based audience where new visitors are those who have not visited before in the current session.
• Referral source: Target visitors arriving from specific websites or campaigns by using the page referrer condition with “contains” to cover all variations.
• Page visits: Segment visitors who have viewed particular pages or downloaded resources, such as finance industry PDFs, and keep them in the audience for a set number of days.
• Logged-in users: Use custom events or cookies to identify users who have logged in and personalize their experience accordingly.

using cookies for segmentation

Cookies are small data pieces stored on visitors’ browsers that can help identify user status or preferences. To use cookies in Unless:

• Whitelist cookies: Add the cookie names to your account settings to allow Unless to read them.
• Target based on cookie existence: Create audiences for visitors who have a specific cookie set.
• Target based on cookie value: Specify both the cookie name and its value to create more precise segments.

For example, you can create an audience for users with a cookie “isLoggedIn” set or those whose “customerPlan” cookie equals “basic.”

self-segmentation for visitor-driven audiences

Self-segmentation lets visitors define their own audience by answering a question on your site. This approach helps you gather missing data directly from users and tailor their journey accordingly.

To set up self-segmentation:

1. Create audiences corresponding to possible answers: Each answer corresponds to an audience defined by the behavior > self-segmentation condition.
2. Add a component with buttons for each answer: Configure each button to assign the visitor to the matching audience.
3. Set a generous membership duration: For example, 30 days to track visitor segments over time.

This method improves personalization and provides insights into your visitor composition.

best practices and tips

• Use “contains” rather than “equals” for conditions like page referrer to cover all variations.
• Combine conditions thoughtfully with AND/OR to avoid overly narrow or broad audiences.
• Start with 2-3 broad audiences and expand as you learn more about your visitors.
• Monitor audience sizes and engagement to ensure meaningful impact.
• Use audience order carefully since Unless evaluates audiences top to bottom, and the first match wins.
• Exclude visitors from certain experiences by placing exclusion audiences higher in the list.

conclusion

Setting up audiences in Unless enables you to segment your visitors effectively and deliver personalized, relevant experiences. By leveraging context, behavior, and profile data, you can create targeted groups that reflect your visitors’ needs and preferences. Whether using default segments, custom conditions, cookies, or self-segmentation, audiences help you optimize your website’s impact and better understand your traffic. Start simple, test your audiences, and refine your strategy to maximize engagement and conversions.