Introducing Audiences: A New Way to Deliver Personalized Experiences

In a world where your customers interact with you every day at multiple touch points across multiple channels, Audiences make it even easier for you to optimize and deliver personalized experiences. Audiences are an evolution to Optimizely visitor targeting that allow you to more easily control which visitors see experiments, and to reuse those targeting conditions across experiments.

Building off an opt-in beta with over 200 participants, we’re excited to announce today that Audiences is rolling out to all Optimizely customers this week.

The launch includes a number of new features that will allow you to more easily optimize your visitors’ digital experience.

Here’s what to look for in this post:

• New “and” “or” logic for combining targeting conditions to create audiences
• Creating audiences by traffic source or campaign
• Audiences for day of the week targeting
• Integrating with Optimizely partners to create new audiences
• Filtering your experiment results by audience
• A story from Mobify about how they personalized their web offering to buyer personas using Audiences

1. Audiences (All plan levels)

Going forward, you can create an audience based on a number of targeting conditions (e.g. search terms, browser type, traffic source), and easily re-use that saved audience to target users and deliver personalized experiences acrossmultiple experiments. There is no limit to the number of audiences you can create.

2. More ways to combine targeting conditions (All plan levels)

With Audiences, you can now easily combine targeting conditions with both “and” and “or” logic through a simple drag-and-drop interface. This would, for example, allow an e-commerce site to target visitors who come from a luxury-related ad campaign or who use related search terms, and who are also higher-spend mobile customers.

3. Targeting by traffic source and campaign (Gold and Platinum)

In addition to adding more ways to combine targeting conditions, we’ve also added more targeting conditions. Now you can use traffic source and campaign as default targeting conditions, without the need to build custom conditions. For example, a subscription news site could use this to display discounted prices to visitors coming from a certain campaign or referral website.

4. Targeting by time of day/week (Platinum)

You can now target by time of day and day of week. For example, a food delivery service could display a promotion to to site visitors during the week from 11:00am to 2:00pm. The time-based targeting is based on the visitor’s local time, and can be used across different time zones (for example, for a franchise restaurant running a promotion across different geographies.)

5. Additional targeting options with Optimizely Technology Partners (All plan levels)

Using Optimizely’s REST API, you can easily create and edit audiences that integrate seamlessly with third party applications like BlueKai and Qualaroo. BlueKai is a Data Management Platform that partners with websites across the internet to track users’ interests. It can be used to target site visitors even if it’s their first time visiting your website. Qualaroo integrates with Audiences through running surveys that allow visitors to self-identify into the most appropriate audience group. Both of these integrations could help identify people in the market for a car, for example, either based on their browsing history (BlueKai) or via self-identification (Qualaroo).

6. Audiences to filter experiment results (Platinum)

You can use the same audiences that you create for visitor targeting to segment your experiment results. For example, you would be able to analyze how people in the “Bargain searchers” audience reacted to a certain experiment vs. people in the “Luxury searchers” audience. Segmenting your experiments through this lens can help inform future targeting campaigns.

Mobify’s Story: Combining qualitative insights with Audiences to deliver personalized experiences

Mobify uses a Qualaroo survey – one of many ways to target an Audience

As a beta-tester, mobile commerce platform Mobify has been using Audiences since early June. To more effectively message their different buyer personas, Mobify defines a number of distinct Audience groups based on visitors’ industry and functional focus. They use a Qualaroo survey to establish which Audience a visitor falls into, and then use Audiences to deliver an optimized experience throughout the site.

Luke Starbuck, Mobify’s Director of Demand Generation, emphasizes that he was particularly impressed by the ease of implementing Audiences, and the extent to which it enabled Mobify to customize the user experience.

Mobify went from a situation where “delivering a tailored experience to business and tech audiences was very difficult” to “experiencing a huge win in being able to more appropriately deliver a personalized message that resonates with each visitor.” With Audiences, Mobify is able to deliver a highly optimized experience and speak to its visitors in a more genuine way across its site.

Landing page tailored to developers

Landing page tailored to business professionals