Key takeaways

In this module, you learned how to:

• Audiences serve two distinct purposes in Target: entry qualification and report filtering. As a targeting audience, they define who is eligible to enter an activity or experience. As a report filter, they act as a lens over the results so you can see how a specific segment performed. These two uses are independent — an audience used for report filtering doesn't need to be the same as the one controlling entry.
• Report filter audiences added after an activity is live are not retroactive. If you add an audience as a report filter after the test is already running, it will only apply to data collected from that moment forward — it will not reach back into the history. Audiences you want to analyze across the full test duration should be defined before the activity launches.
• Standard audiences use Target's 13 built-in attributes; custom audiences use your organization's data. Standard attributes include geo, browser, device type, operating system, and visitor profile attributes like new vs. returning. Custom audiences are built from data your implementation passes to Target — such as on-page parameters, campaign codes, search terms, CRM customer attributes, or profile script values. These custom values appear under the "custom" category in the audience builder.
• Multiple values in a single attribute field act as OR logic; AND logic between attributes requires a container. Listing multiple country names under the GEO attribute means "any of these countries" — visitors matching any one value qualify. To require two different attribute types to both be true (such as GEO and traffic source), you drag the second attribute type into a container and specify that the container's rules must be met with AND logic relative to the first set.
• Use "contains" instead of "equals" for URL-based audience rules. Real-world URLs almost always have query parameters, UTM codes, or other characters appended after the pattern you care about. "Contains" acts as a wildcard and matches the pattern anywhere in the URL. "Equals" requires an exact full match — meaning a URL like `example.com/fr?utm_source=email` would fail an "equals .fr" rule but pass a "contains .fr" rule.