Audience (new)
Outline
Welcome
In this module, you will see how Optimizely Data Platform (ODP)'s Audiences help you market to specific groups of customers, leveraging both attributes and behaviors of a customer and past behaviors, as well as reacting to their real-time engagement with your site.
After completing this module, you should be able to:
Difference between the two types of audience
Distinguish events and attributes
Analyze the structure of audience to determine what it does
What is it? / Why use it?
Audience is a subset of your customers, divided up according to specific criteria. Using audiences, you can market to customers based on specific factors, sending them advertisements for maximum effectiveness.
You can create two types of audiences:
- Real-Time audiences – The real-time audience builder uses the ODP GraphQL API, letting you segment customers in real time and further personalize your customers' web-based experience.
- Standard audiences – The standard audience builder uses historical customer data by using customer attributes, insights, and behaviors.
Standard Segments vs. Real-Time Segments
While both standard and real-time audiences allow you to choose groups of customers based on attributes and events, they have very different applications.
Here’s a short comparison to help you know which audience is right for a given situation.
| Standard Audience | Real-Time Audience | |
|---|---|---|
| Refresh Rate | Updates when used in a report, a new campaign, or queried by a user | In real time, based on customer action on the website, usually within 90 seconds or less |
| Customer Events Timeframe | All recorded customer events in database | Only events less than 28 days old |
| Used With | ODP Campaigns, Profiles, Lifecycles, Reports, and other ODP Features | Optimizely Web and Feature Experimentation, Content Management System, ODP Web Campaigns |
| Sync? | Can sync with services like Google and Facebook | Cannot sync with other services |
| In Summary | Use when a broader scope is required or you're targeting long-term trend | Use when you need to respond quickly and target customers while they are engaged with your site |
Attributes and Events
The core elements of ODP's data are attributes and events.
Attributes describe the qualities of a customer, ranging from direct information like country of origin, email address, and date of birth, to classifications derived from ODP's data analysis, such as "lifetime value of purchases" or "likely to order again."
Events represent specific actions a customer performs, which are typically narrower in scope, including actions like clicking a product details page, adding an item to a cart, or opening a support ticket.
By combining attributes and events, and with the help of ODP's data-driven insights, you can target very specific customer types in your campaigns.
Audience Structure
For standard audience, it is organized in a sentence structure that makes it easy to build and easy to understand.
The first part of the audience explains who we are filtering for—the type of customer we want to look at based on a particular event or attribute.
Simple statements can be combined with the logical operators and & or to produce more complex statements.
In the above example, the statement will return customers who have visited the website at least once but did not interact within the last two months.
Real-time audience is organized in a structure that makes it easy to build and understand. They are built around conditions, which are either attribute-based or event-based. Each one includes at least one condition group, containing at least one attribute condition or event condition.
When building the condition groups, determine if you should include or exclude customers, and if you are doing so based on all, or some, of the conditions.
In the example above, the conditions set will return customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase anything.
To get a better grasp on audience, watch this guided demo:
ODP - Customers - Audience
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