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Setting up audiences to segment your visitors

Setting up audiences to segment your visitors is a powerful way to tailor experiences, personalize interactions, and control access based on who your visitors are and how they behave. Audiences let you group visitors by shared characteristics such as their location, behavior, or profile data, enabling you to deliver relevant content and offers that match their needs and context. This article explains how to create and manage audiences effectively, including advanced targeting techniques like URL parameters, cookies, and self-segmentation.

understanding audiences and their purpose

Audiences are segments of visitors or customers defined by specific conditions related to context, behavior, or profile data. They help you differentiate between groups such as new visitors, returning customers, or users coming from a particular campaign. By segmenting visitors, you can customize the experience they receive without creating separate workflows for each variation.

There are two main types of audiences:

• Default audiences: Pre-built segments like everyone, new visitors, returning visitors, desktop users, and mobile users. These are ready to use immediately.

• Custom audiences: Segments you build by combining multiple targeting conditions. These can be based on geolocation, device type, referral source, session count, CRM data, and more.

Each audience has a membership duration, which determines how long a visitor remains in that segment after qualifying. This duration should align with your sales cycle or the relevance of the signal you use.

creating audiences with basic and advanced targeting

basic audience creation

To create an audience, go to Train > Audiences > Create audience. Define the conditions that visitors must meet to join the audience. You can combine multiple conditions using AND or OR logic. For example, you might create an audience for visitors from a specific country who are using mobile devices.

Set the membership duration to control how long visitors stay in the audience. Finally, order your audiences carefully because the system uses a first-match-wins approach. Place narrower, more specific audiences above broader ones to ensure correct matching.

advanced audience targeting

Beyond basic conditions, you can use advanced patterns to refine your audiences:

• URL parameter targeting: Build audiences based on query string parameters like utm_source, utm_campaign, or any custom parameter. Use the “contains” condition rather than “equals” to handle variations like trailing slashes or tracking suffixes.

• Cookie targeting: Use cookies set by your application to segment visitors. Cookies must be whitelisted in your account settings and cannot be httpOnly. You can match audiences by the existence of a cookie or by its exact value.

• Self-segmentation: Let visitors define their own audience by answering a question through a component on your site. Each answer assigns the visitor to a different audience. This is useful when you lack behavioral or profile signals.

You can combine these conditions within a single audience using AND or OR logic to create highly specific segments.

setting up self-segmentation audiences

Self-segmentation allows visitors to choose their own segment by interacting with a component on your site. Before setting this up, create the audiences that correspond to each possible answer. If visitors join an audience solely by self-segmentation, set the targeting condition to Behavior > Self-segmentation.

When naming these audiences, choose clear, descriptive names and consider a generous membership duration (such as 30 days) to gather meaningful insights about your traffic composition.

If you already know some visitors’ audience membership through other signals, you can exclude them from the self-segmentation experience or include them to confirm or double-check their segment.

best practices for audience management

• Use contains rather than equals for URL parameter matching to avoid missing visitors due to URL variations.

• Whitelist cookies in Account and billing > Account settings > Cookie whitelist before using them for targeting.

• Order audiences from narrowest to broadest to ensure the correct audience matches first.

• Combine multiple conditions thoughtfully to avoid overly strict or conflicting criteria.

• Use membership duration aligned with your business cycle to keep audience membership relevant.

• Avoid intrusive self-segmentation questions; ensure they add value and fit naturally into the visitor experience.

conclusion

Segmenting your visitors into audiences is essential for delivering personalized, relevant experiences that improve engagement and conversion. By leveraging both basic and advanced targeting methods—including URL parameters, cookies, and self-segmentation—you can create precise visitor groups tailored to your business needs. Careful audience setup, naming, and ordering ensure your segmentation works smoothly and effectively over time.