Manage audiences

Audiences let you deliver personalized content to specific groups of visitors based on their behavior, attributes, and actions. Use audiences to show different homepage banners to first-time versus returning visitors, surface campaign-specific offers, or restrict content access by visitor profile. To manage audiences, the editor must be a member of the VisitorGroupAdmins role, which grants access to the Audiences tab.

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Note

Audiences work only on traditional (in-process) sites, where CMS manages both content authoring and frontend rendering. Audiences do not work on headless sites, where the frontend is an independent application that consumes content through APIs.

An audience (formerly called a visitor group) consists of one or more personalization criteria. Each criterion defines which visitors belong to the audience. Built-in criteria include the number of visits, referring search phrases, and many others. Developers can extend this list with custom criteria.

To create an audience, select one or more criteria and define their settings. The criteria determine whether a visitor belongs to the audience and which personalized content they see.

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. Enter a unique Name that distinguishes this audience from others. When you select the content on a page, this name displays in the personalized content box.

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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. Enter a description of the audience and its purpose within Notes. CMS displays this description as a tooltip when an editor adds the audience to a page.

5. Select Enable statistics to track this audience's performance.

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   Note

   When you enable statistics for audiences (visitor groups), the Google Analytics app (GA4) can analyze the traffic data to provide rich insights into website traffic and marketing effectiveness.

   

6. Select Make this audience available when setting access rights for pages and files to expose this audience in the admin view when access rights are configured.

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   Note

   Audiences grant only read access.

7. Click Add criteria to display a drop-down list of available criteria. See Create audience criteria for definitions.

8. Select a criterion and adjust its settings from the drop-down list. Add more than one criterion when needed.

9. 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 – A visitor joins the audience when at least one criterion matches.
• Points – Assign weights when some criteria matter more than others. The visitor must reach a points threshold to join the audience.

10. Click Create Audience.

Copy an audience

1. Select More (…) > Duplicate on the audience you want to copy.

   

2. Confirm the duplication. The new audience has the same name as the original with the suffix Copy.

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

Delete an audience

1. Select More (…) > Delete on the audience you want to delete.
2. Confirm the deletion.

Configure values for site criteria and points

Use points to assign a value to each action, such as visiting a campaign page. In the example below, a visitor who matches 8 of the 12 points joins the audience.

1. Select Points in the Match drop-down list.

2. Enter a Threshold of 8 points.

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   Note

   The example assigns 12 points across the criteria. The visitor must match at least eight of the 12 points to join 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, visitors can match a referrer-based audience after they search for optimizely and cms on Google.com and click the Optimizely landing page link from the search result page.

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

Install Optimizely Forms and the Optimizely Forms Samples package to enable the forms audience criteria.

• Base an audience on whether the visitor has submitted a particular form or form value. For example, target content to a visitor who Has submitted a Job Application.
• 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 previews a page as a specific audience sees it, based on that audience's criteria. Editors can verify that personalized content displays correctly before they publish the page.

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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. A list of available audiences displays. Select an audience to render the page from that audience's perspective.

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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. To exit preview mode, use the preview controls.

Commerce Connect audience criteria

Commerce Connect adds audience criteria for customer properties, markets, and order frequency. See Personalization for Commerce Connect.

Marketing automation audience criteria

Marketing automation adds dedicated audience criteria. See marketing automation for details.