Create audiences

I’m going to walk you through creating audiences in Target. Audiences are defined by rules that determine who is included or excluded from a target activity. I’ll select Audiences in the top navigation. This will default to the Audience Library category, which is what I’ll show today. In the upper right corner, I’ll click the Create audience button. This opens the audience builder user interface. The first thing I’ll do is enter a name and description for my audience in the right panel. It should be descriptive enough to identify the visitors who qualify for it, so that if there’s any other people in your organization who can benefit from using this audience in Target, they can easily see this and avoid duplication. Now I’m going to add rules to the audience to limit membership to a subset of your visitor population. I’m going to show you some out of the box features to help you create your audiences. I’m going to go through this list to explain the different types of options available. Each of these can be placed on the canvas by dragging and dropping them. First, there’s the Target Library. These are out of the box criteria that you can access here as well as in the main dropdown. The next option is Geo. These are items that are based on the visitor’s location using a geo IP lookup table. You have options to target based on country, state, city, et cetera. Network is based on visitor ISP info or connection speed. Mobile is based on the type of device the visitor is using and its characteristics. You can set up high level criteria such as are they using a phone or a tablet? Or you can get very detailed criteria like which specific device, operating system, or operating system version do they use? Custom lets you leverage inbox parameters you’ve built into your target implementation that contain attributes about the visitor and what they’re doing. For example, if you wanted to know whether a visitor was logged into your site or not, you can pass that to target as an inbox parameter, and then target to that parameter in your audience. OS lets you target desktop operating systems. Site Pages let you target the URL the visitor is currently on, was previously on, or what they landed on. The latter of which is the first inbox page that the visitor went to. This is also useful for determining which marketing channels a visitor came to your site from, as they’ll typically contain an identifier in the URL. Browser lets you target different browser types and versions as well as the browser language. Visitor Profile lets you target out of the box items like visitor, new visitor and also those coming from your customized profile scripts or passed in profile parameters from implementation. Profiles are visitor records in the target database. Profile scripts are covered in a different video, but these are very helpful in creating customized audiences for your website. For example, if a visitor viewed a product on your website who didn’t purchase it, you can show them an image of that product the next time they visit your site or on a subsequent page during the same visit.

Traffic Sources contains items that identify where the visitor was before entering your site. These are search engines or the referring landing page. Time Frame lets you establish an audience based on start and end dates and times to target users who visit your site during a specific timeframe. You can also set week and day parting options to create recurring patterns for audience targeting. Now that you’re familiar with the criteria you can use in rules for creating audiences, we’ll look at some options available for defining an audience attribute. Now, let’s say you have a particular product that is popular in Kyrgyzstan. You don’t know exactly how it’s spelled, but you do know it begins with the letter K. So I’m going to drag Geo to my rule, I’m going to select Matches and I’m going to type in K. Once I do this, the search criteria will be filtered with all the countries that begin with the letter K. Now I see the country I want to use in the list, I’ll selected to add it to the rule.

Now, let’s say you want to market in Kyrgyzstan as well. I’m going to start typing KAZ in the text field. Now I’m going to select it to add it to the rule. When two items are selected, it will automatically or by default use an Or condition. Another option is just using a free form entry box. Once again, I’m going to take a look at what’s available under Geo and I’m going to pull over Zip code. Now, there’s just too many zip codes to show in a dropdown list. I have options for Contains, Does not contain, Equals, Does not equal, et cetera. I’m going to select Contains. And then from here, I’m going to add several zip codes. So now the rule comprises visitors from either country and those that have any of these three zip code values. Now, the zip codes that I entered, they’re all US based and the join operator is And. So I wouldn’t get any membership back, given my example. I’m going to flip this to an Or condition and then the membership will include visitors in these countries or in any of these three zip codes. You can add additional rules that will allow you to construct very powerful audiences in this very simple UI. I’m going to add a new container and then add the mobile attribute to it to show you how this works. In the upper right corner, I’ll select the Add container link. When I do this, notice it uses an Or condition by default. First I’m going to drag the mobile attribute to the new rule. At this point, I could set this attribute up or I could remove it if it’s not needed. I’m going to remove the mobile rule by selecting the three picker to the right of the container and then selecting Delete container. Now we see that the mobile rule is removed from the builder. Once you’re done with creating your audience, select Done in the upper right corner, which is what I’ll do now, and you’ll notice the new audience will appear in your audience’s list. You should now feel comfortable creating audiences in Target. Good luck. -