Create sequential audiences

Hey everybody, it’s Doug. In this video I want to show you how to create what I’m going to call a sequential segment in platform. So, in the segments dialogue let’s jump over and create a new segment.

And first of all, if I say sequential, that means, you know, there’s going to be time involved which means we’re definitely going to use events not attributes because attributes don’t really have any time associated with them. It’s just the status or kind of metadata for the person. But events will definitely have a timestamp so we will use events in this case. So, we can really use any items in here, any events, but you’ll see these event types down here in the bottom and there’s this list of different event types. And in case you haven’t seen another video that talked about these, I will remind you if I go up to my dataset that these are hits or events that have the event type field here and have that in there. Okay? So, if it has an event type in here that’s what will show up in that event type UI screen. I also have another data set here that does not have that field but it has other things that are event-related. Right? Like a product view or a product list ads or checkout or a purchase. And so, in these cases you could just use them from the other list. In fact, I’ll just point at it. Up here you could browse for it or search for it, it just won’t end up in this event types list if it doesn’t have that event type field. Okay. So, to make this easy I’m just going to grab some things out of here, but again you could use anything out of this entire section on the left as long as you’re in the events section, because again they have a timestamp associated with them. Okay. So, let’s start putting some things in our canvas and we’ll start putting them in time order. Right, so I’m just going to put name and we’ll put a product list name. That’s good, we’ll throw that in there. And then I think I’m going to go down a little bit here, I’m going to put a web page details and I’m going to put that in there. And instead of on the left, as you can see kind of their highlighting, I’m going to put it underneath. And so, it’s right underneath it right there. And now here’s a tip. You can’t tell by looking at these which one is which. One is a page name and one is a product name. So, be sure if you’re going to pull those over and it just says name like that and it’s not using any events type so it looks like any event, then you’re going to want to fill out any of this qualifying stuff down here right away. So, the bottom one was a page name and some just going to say, page name contains, let’s go, contains and I’m going to say jewelry or jewelry if you like to spell it that way.

And then the top one, I’m going to say that was a product so you can see that one’s a little easier to tell. Product list items where the name and we’re going to say contains, let’s say watches.

Okay. Now I’m going to go back to my page name, I’m going to drag one in right before those and I’m going to make that one. If I click on and open that back up again I’m going to do that one equals home, like this. So, they’re on my homepage and then it looks like they go to these and then I’m going to go to, in fact, my event types. So, I’m going to get rid of this and I’m going to go down to my event types. In fact, I’ll just search to make it easier and checkouts and I’ll put a checkout event like this on the side right there, and then we’ll even do a purchase.

We’ll do this purchase event and we’ll put it over here on the side, okay. So, you can see that you can actually drag these things on top or before or after and think of this as a timeline. Right? So you have this timeline. So, first they went to the homepage. We have that one right here if we click on that again. We had that homepage and then they went to one of these two things, but it looks like “and” so I’m going to talk about “and” or “or” here in a second. So, they went here then they did a checkout and then they did a purchase. So just to have more room, I’m going to kind of collapse that bottom part so we can see this. But again, think of this as a timeline. And you can see up here at the top we can say this all had to happen within a certain time. So, it can be any time. Or if you say, you know what I’m only going to give them, you know, a month or I’m going to have to say it has to be this year or this month, or it had to happen all in one day like had happened today or yesterday or whatever. Right? So anyway you can set a time period here for this entire series. And then you also have some in-between items here. So, if I click on that little clock there I can do an after or within. So, if I want to do after it has to be, you know this one and then have they have to wait a week before they do this next step. So it might be more common for you to go within and say, yeah after they go to the home page, you know, within let’s say within a day or an hour or whatever, anyway they have to go to this next one. And after you mark that, you just click out of it and then that’ll go away. Okay. It’s still there. Right. See, okay. Within one day, first I go to the home page within one day they do one of these two things or I should say both of them. Okay. If there’s an “and” let me do the easier one first, “or”. “Or” is easier. They either have to go within one day. They either have to go here which is a product list, item of watches. Okay. Or they have to go to this other page, which is a page. And it says jewelry, has to be in the name. Okay. So let me collapse that again. So, they can kind of take either path. They can go this way and then go over here or they can go this way over here, I really wouldn’t matter if they did both, right? They have to do at least one of them. And then they have to check out. So again, we’ll say you know, this one is maybe within, let’s say Three days And then this one over here, how long that purchase? We want them to purchase fast. So, we’ll say within, you know say within eight hours. How’s that? Okay. So, we have all these different time options here that you can do between these steps. And again, in this case, they can take this direction, they can take the bottom way or they can do both of them. Last but not least, well, what if that’s an “and” let’s look at that. At first glance, you might think that they have to do both of these things at the same time. Well, this could be very difficult based on the rules that I put there, which is, you know viewing a certain product or a certain group of products. And then also that page having, you know, something specific in the page name, and those might not match up. They might, the way that we did it. But what if they didn’t? The reality here is that these do not have to be at the exact same time. They don’t have to have the same timestamp. It just means that you have to do both of these before this next step. Right? So, after this step and within one day they have to do both of these items and then they move on. Of course. And then, you know, within three days they have checkout and then within eight hours they have a purchase, et cetera. So don’t be fooled by that. And, and those being on the same line there or same column, to think that they might have to have the same timestamp. They don’t. They just have to do both of those. And it has to be, you know in between these two other steps. Anyway, I hope that was helpful to kind of give you an idea of this very flexible and very powerful feature of sequential segmentation. Good luck. -