Audience Targeting

What is Intelligems Audience Targeting?

Limit and customize the audience of your tests to specific segments based on device, URL parameters, traffic source, and more.

By default, a test is shown to all visitors accessing your site. You may, however, choose to limit which visitors are exposed to a test. For example, you may wish to

  • Test several treatments of a “welcome back” banner for returning visitors only

  • Show a landing page test only to visitors arriving from a social campaign

  • Include only visitors from a specific country or place them in a specific test group

Intelligems allows you to limit which visitors should be exposed to a test based on specific criteria. It also allows you to control which particular test group a visitor should be placed into. When setting up and modifying any type of test, you may choose from three different options to limit who should see your test:

  • Target by Common Audience: limit based on common criteria such as new/returning, device, traffic source (ex: email vs social), and country

  • Target by Custom Audience: limit by mixing any type of condition, including device, cookie, UTM parameters, and others into logical statements

  • Advanced Targeting: specify which audiences should be assigned to which groups in the test and more

Common Audiences

Common audiences allow you to target your test based one or more common criteria (called “Conditions”).

  • Device Type: Target only users coming from desktop or mobile devices

  • New or Returning Visitors: Target only users who have visited your site before, or who are brand new

  • Traffic Source: target users from one or more common traffic sources, such as email, SMS, social, and others, without having to define your own detailed targeting conditions. These can be divided into two categories

    • Common Categories: Direct, Email, Referral, Organic Social, Paid Social, Organic Search, Paid Search, SMS. Site traffic is classified using the same industry standard rules used by Google Analytics, mostly via combination of UTM parameters and referring domain.

    • Common Sources: Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter. Intelligems classifies traffic using a combination of referring domain, UTM source, and user agent in order to capture traffic from all possible entry points including in-app browsers, websites, and more.

  • Country: Target one or more countries.

You may choose a single condition or a combination of conditions. If you combine conditions, a visitor must match ALL conditions to be included in your test. However, you may select multiple allowable values for country and traffic source. For example, you may limit a test to:

Custom Audiences

When Common audiences don’t suffice, Custom audiences allow you to define a very specific combination of criteria that a visitor must meet in order to be included in a test.

Structure

You may be familiar with the structure of custom audiences from other e-commerce tools:

  • A custom audience contains one or more clauses.

  • Every clause contains one or more conditions.

  • The conditions in a clause are OR-ed together. This means that if at least one of the conditions in a clause is met by a visitor, the clause is satisfied.

  • The clauses are AND-ed together. This means that if there is more than one clause, all clauses must be satisfied.

Available Audience Conditions

  • Device Type: desktop or mobile devices

  • New or Returning: new or returning visitors

  • Traffic Source: common traffic sources

  • Country: specific countries

  • URL Parameter: check if a particular URL parameter is defined or matches a value or pattern. Out of box UTM parameters such as campaign, medium, and source are commonly used for targeting traffic from a particular campaign or platform.

  • Landing Page URL: target only visitors who entered your site through a specific page or pages. If you frequently create ad campaigns that point to the same landing page, this can be an efficient way to target only visitors from these campaigns, rather than targeting by UTM parameters and frequently updating the test with new campaign UTM parameters.

  • Referring Domain: check if visitor arrived via link from a particular domain, such as Google, LinkedIn, Amazon, or other. Often used in combination with URL Parameters.

  • JavaScript Expression: check if an arbitrary javascript expression of your choice evaluates to true. This is handy for many specialized scenarios: including only people that arrived via a particular landing page, excluding people arriving on any page that contains a certain element, excluding developers, and more. One example use case for this would be targeting Klaviyo subscribers. In order to do this, you could add the below to your theme code, and add localStorage.getItem('klaviyoIdentified') === 'true' to ur JavaScript targeting.

window.klaviyo.isIdentified((e) => {
    localStorage.setItem('klaviyoIdentified', e);
})
  • Cookie: check if a particular cookie is set or matches a value or pattern. This is useful for targeting based on Shopify visitor characteristics, cart information, and previous behavior on the site.

Advanced Targeting

Rather than just identifying which visitors should be exposed to a test, Advanced Targeting additionally allows you to assign particular audiences to specific groups in the test, or to permanently exclude them.

This is done by creating multiple if-then clauses, where each clause allows you to build an audience (Common or Custom) and then choose how that audience should be treated by the test.

For each audience you define, Intelligems can take one of the following actions:

  • Assign it to a specific test group: include the visitor in the test and assign a specific group. For example, to reach statistical significance faster you may want to place all international visitors in the Control Group (rather than excluding them), and distribute everyone else across several treatment groups.

  • Assign it a test group randomly: include the visitor in the test and assign a test group as usual based on the %s defined in the test setup.

  • Exclude it from the test: exclude the visitor from this test permanently. Intelligems will no longer assess whether they match the audience or not on subsequent page loads.

  • Do not assign it: visitor will not be placed in the test but will also not be permanently excluded. Intelligems will re-assess every time they visit a new page.

You might use Advanced Audiences to allocate specific ad campaigns to specific groups. For example: if utm_campaign = fb_123abc then assign to Group A, else if utm_campaign = fb_456xyz then assign to Group B, else leave unassigned. This will put all traffic from the first campaign into Group A and the second campaign into Group B, but leave everyone else out of the test. This way you can make sure your ads match each website experience you’re testing.

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