Manage audiences

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Note

Audiences are supported on traditional (in-process) sites, where the CMS manages both content authoring and frontend rendering. They are not supported on headless sites, where the frontend is a fully independent application that consumes content through APIs. If your implementation uses a headless architecture, audience-based personalization is not available through this mechanism.

Personalization in CMS lets you target website content to selected audiences (formerly called visitor groups). The personalization feature is based on customized audiences that you create based on a set of personalization criteria. CMS provides a set of criteria, such as the number of visits and referring search phrases. You can also develop customized criteria.

You can manage audiences from the Audiences tab. When creating an audience, you select one or more criteria and define appropriate settings. Those criteria determine whether a user visiting the website is a part of that audience.

Making the editor a member of VisitorGroupAdmins provides access to the Audiences tab.

Create or edit an audience

1. Select Audiences.

2. Click Create Audience. The Create Audience window displays. If you select an existing audience, the Edit Audience window displays, but they have the same information.

   

3. Give the audience a unique name to separate it from other audiences.

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   Note

   If you change the name of an audience available in the list for access rights, the settings for this audience no longer work.

4. Name the audience you are creating in Name. When you select the content on a page, this name is displayed in the personalized content box.

5. In Notes, type a descriptive text about your intended audience, for example, its purpose. This description displays as a tooltip when the editor adds an audience to a page's content.

6. Select Enable statistics for this audience to track audience performance.

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   Note

   When you enable statistics for audiences (visitor groups), the Google Analytics app (GA v4) can analyze the traffic data to provide rich insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

   

7. Select the Make this audience available when setting access rights for pages and files check box if you want this audience to be available when setting access rights for pages and files in the admin view.

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   Note

   Audiences only have read access.

8. Click Add criteria to see a drop-down menu with available criteria. See Create audience criteria.

9. From the drop-down menu, select a criteria and adjust its settings as necessary. Add more than one criterion if needed.

10. Select one of the following in the Match drop-down list.

• All – Select this if you want all criteria met for a visitor to be included in the audience.
• Any – Select this if it is enough that only one of the criteria is met for a visitor to be included in the audience.
• Points – Use points if you want to set that some criteria are more important than others.

11. Click Create Audience.

Copy an audience

1. On the audience you want to copy, select More > Duplicate.

   

2. Confirm the copy action. The copy has the same name as the original but with the extension – Copy.

3. Rename and change the criteria for the audience you have copied.

Delete an audience

1. On the audience you want to delete, select More > Delete.
2. Confirm the deletion.

Configure values for site criteria and points

Using points, you can set a value for how much an action is worth, such as a visited campaign page. In this example, a visitor who matches 8 of the 12 criteria is included in the audience.

1. In the Match menu, select the criteria to match Points.

2. Enter a Threshold of 8 points.

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   Note

   The example gives 12 points-worth of criteria and the visitor must match at least 8 of the 12 points to be included in the audience.

3. Click Add Criteria and select Site Criteria > Number of Visits.

   • Select More than > 4 > In total. (To create an audience for visitors who have never visited the page, select Less than > 1 > Since[date].)
   • Enter 2 points, and select whether or not the criterion is required.

4. Click Add Criteria and select Site Criteria > Selected Language.

   • Select Is > English.
   • Leave the default 0 and select Required.

5. Click Add Criteria and select Site Criteria > Visited Page.

   • Click Select Page and select a page (Become a reseller). 
   • Enter 4 points.

6. Click Add Criteria and select Site Criteria > Visited Page.

   • Click Select Page and select a page (Find a reseller). 
   • Enter 2 points.

7. Click Add Criteria and select Site Criteria > Downloaded file.

   • Enter a file that you want the visitor to download (/reseller-application-form.pdf).

   • Enter 4 points.

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   Note

   By giving 4-point values to Become a reseller and the downloaded file, it stresses that these criteria are more important (higher value targets) than the Find a reseller criterion.

8. Click Create Audience.

Target referrers

The HTTP Referrer is based on pages like those used in a campaign. For example, you can target content to visitors who...

• search for optimizely and cms on Google.com
• from the search result page, click the Optimizely landing page link

1. Click Add Criteria and select URL Criteria > Referrer.

2. Select URL > Equals > the URL of the search engine result page, for example, https://www.google.se/#hl=sv&source=hp&biw=1338&bih=790&q=optimizely+cms.

   

3. Click Save.

Target visitors who fill in a form

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Important

Optimizely Forms and the Optimizely Forms Samples package must be installed for the forms audience criteria to work.

• You can base an audience on whether the visitor has (or has not) submitted a particular form or form value. For example, you can target content to a visitor who Has submitted a Job Application.
• You can target content to visitors who give you a low rating on a Satisfaction Survey.
  • Selected form > Satisfaction survey
  • Selected field > Multiple/Single choice
  • Condition > equals
  • Value > 1

View as Audience preview

The View as Audience feature lets you preview a page exactly as a specific audience would see it, based on the audience criteria configured for that group. This allows editors to verify that personalized content is displaying correctly for each audience before publishing.

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Note

The View as Audience preview is available for sites where Audiences are configured. It is not available for decoupled frontend deployments where personalization is evaluated client-side or at the CDN layer.

Select View as Audience from the preview controls in the top menu bar. A list of configured audiences displays. Select an audience to render the page as that visitor group would see it.

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Note

The audience preview renders the page using the same criteria evaluation logic used for live visitors. Content that requires a session state (such as cart data or login status) may not reflect the full personalized experience in preview mode.

To return to the standard edit view, select View as Audience again and choose No audience selected, or toggle off the preview mode using the preview controls in the top menu.

Optimizely Commerce Connect audience criteria

See also audience criteria specific to ecommerce include customer properties, markets, and order frequency criteria. See Personalization for Optimizely Commerce Connect.

Optimizely Marketing Automation audience criteria

See also audience criteria specifically designed for marketing automation.