Create audience criteria

Audience criteria are the rules that determine whether a visitor belongs to an audience (formerly called a visitor group). Combine criteria (such as visit count, location, or referrer) to define the visitor segments you want to personalize content for. See Manage audiences for how audiences use these criteria. CMS includes the following audience criteria, grouped by category.

Prerequisites

Confirm the following before you create audience criteria:

• Role and access – Members of the VisitorGroupAdmins role manage criteria from the Audiences tab.
• Optimizely Forms add-on – Install Optimizely Forms and the Optimizely Forms Samples package to use forms criteria.
• Geolocation provider – Register a geolocation provider (such as AddCmsClientGeolocation or another IGeolocationProvider) to use the Geographic Location criterion.

Audiences

• Audience Membership – Match membership in an existing audience.

Site criteria

• Number of Visits – Matches the number of times the visitor has visited the website. Specify Less than, Equal, or More than for a given number of days, weeks, months, or years, from a specific date, or in total. For example, Less than 1 visit within 10 days.

  

• Selected Language – Checks which language the visitor is viewing a page in when using fallbacks. For example, check if the visitor views a page in English by selecting the In condition or not in the Svenska language by selecting the Is Not condition. The list shows defined and enabled languages.

  

• User Profile – Match one of the user profile properties with a specified value, such as email address contains Optimizely. Select Comment, Username, Email address, or Phone number, choose Equals, Contains, Starts with, or Ends with, and enter the criterion value.

  

• Visited Category – Select one of the website's page categories. You can also select a number of pages that use the category and were visited. The visitor must have visited the specified number of pages to which the category is applied. For example, Category Alloy Meet viewed at least 3 pages out of 4 pages.

  

• Visited Page – Select a site page. The criterion matches when the visitor visited that page during the current session.

  

Technical criteria

• Display Channel – Matches the visitor's current display channel. Use this criterion to distinguish between web and mobile visitors. Add the Display Channel criterion from the Technical Criteria category, and select Mobile or Web channel.

  

• IP Range – Matches an exact IP address or an IP range that is equal to or above, or equal to and below a defined IP number, used by the visitor when visiting the website.

  • Equal to – To match with an exact IP address, select the equal sign (=) and enter the exact IP address.

    

  • Equal to or above (>=) – When you use >=, the system converts both the visitor's IP address and the specified IP address into integers and compares them. The visitor matches the criterion when the visitor's integer is equal to or higher than the specified integer.

  • Equal to or below (<=) – When you use <=, the system converts both the visitor's IP address and the specified IP address into integers and compares them. The visitor matches the criterion when the visitor's integer is equal to or lower than the specified integer.

• OS & Browser – Select the operating system and browser.

  

• Role – Matches the visitor's access role. Include roles with the In role condition or exclude roles with the Not in role condition.

  

Time and place criteria

• Event – Matches a set date period.

  

  For example, you can configure this audience criterion for sale events on the first day of every month by selecting the Every Month recurrence.

  Recurrence can be:

  • Every Month – Occurs on a specific day in every month, with start from the set Start Time.

  • Every Year – Occurs once a year on a specific day, with start from the set Start Time.

  • Never – The criterion does not recur. The condition matches only within the period defined by Start Time and End Time.

  📘

  Note

  When you select Every Month or Every Year, End Time is unavailable.

• Geographic location – Match the location of the visitor with a specified geographic location.

  

  Two requirements must be in place to populate the Continent, Country, and Region fields under Geographic Location:

  • Geolocation Configuration – Your environment must have geolocation capabilities explicitly configured. In CMS 13, this means ensuring that AddCmsClientGeolocation(...) or another IGeolocationProvider is properly registered and configured. Without this configuration, the Geographic Location controls are unavailable.

  • Geo-Location Provider Data – The system relies on a geo-location provider (such as Cloudflare CDN) to supply the actual geographic information. Even when geolocation is configured, the level of detail available depends on the provider. For example, Region is unavailable when the provider does not supply regional data for the selected country.

  📘

  Note

  Both prerequisites are required. Missing either disables one or more Geographic Location fields.

• Time of Day – Matches the set time period. For example, Saturday and Sunday between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m.

  

• Time On Site – Matches the total length of a user's visit from when the session started. The criterion matches when the total length of time is greater than or equal to the configured time.

  • Time On Site – The value range is from 0 to 60.

  • Duration Unit – The duration can be Seconds, Minutes, or Hours.

    

• Time Period – Matches the time and date of the visit. The criterion matches when the visit falls within the specified time period. To apply it, drag the Time Period criterion from the Time and Place Criteria category.

  

URL criteria

• Download File – Matches a specific file considered already viewed or loaded by browsers. The file path can be the file name only or a relative path to a file. The audience criterion is considered met if the path to a loaded image contains the configured path. For example, you can use this criterion to check if the image CompanyLogo.png is viewed by entering the path to the image.

  

• Landing URL – Matches the URL the visitor uses to enter the site. Decide whether the landing URL Equals, Starts with, or Ends with a specified value. For example, contains www.example to match www.example.com, www.exampleURL.com and so on.

  

• Query string – Matches the request to see if it contains a query string key with the specified value. Conditions can be:

  • Exist – Checks only if the key exists in the query string.

  • Has Value – Checks both the key and the value in the query string of the URL.

    When you select Exist, the Value text field is unavailable.

    

• Referrer – Matches the host name or URL of the referring page, such as a search engine result page. Decide whether the referrer criterion matches on equal, contain, start with, or end with a specified value for the whole or parts of the host name or URL.

  

• Search Keyword – Stores the URL of the referring page, such as a search engine result page. A developer can define this criterion to match the search word against the URL with a regular expression. The regular expression finds search words in the URL.

  

  📘

  Note

  Google search privacy restrictions block this criterion.

Audience membership criteria

• Audience Membership – Select members from existing audiences. For example, Member of Alloy Track for free, or Not a Member of Start Customer Club.

  

Optimizely forms criteria

Install Optimizely Forms separately, then install the Optimizely Forms Samples package to enable the forms audience criteria. See Form Element Types for the Optimizely Forms Samples package section.

• Submitted Form – Matches when a visitor submits (or does not submit) a particular form that you select from a drop-down list. For example, Has Submitted Job Application.
• Submitted Form Value – Matches when a visitor submits a particular form value.