Did you know?#3: How to target and run your experiment based on custom audience segments in PageSense

Did you know?#3: How to target and run your experiment based on custom audience segments in PageSense


Whatever kind of online business you're running, defining your target audience is the key factor to delivering relevant messages and further positioning your brand in the industry. Most marketing efforts revolve around this basic strategy of segmenting people who have similar needs, values, or characteristics and later targeting them with products or services meant to appeal to these ideal audience groups.  

Luckily, the same concept applies to website testing and optimization processes. By choosing a target audience for your experiment, you get to decide whom you should focus on and where you should run your experiments on your site. This method of audience targeting helps you reach the right consumers interested in your products or services with relevant messaging rather than entire audience groups who are less likely to convert on your website.

So, how do you target the right audience for your experiment? 

Using Zoho PageSense's audience targeting, you can both target basic audience segments (for instance, visitors coming to your site for the first time, visitors from a social media platform, and more) and tailor your own segments using the custom audience feature.

In today's post, we'll learn about what custom targeted audience segments are and how to successfully build your own custom audience condition in PageSense to boost your website's conversions.

A custom audience in PageSense is a more refined approach of audience targeting. This feature lets you target and run your experiment to more precise subgroups or subsets of audiences based on visitor parameters like their geography, age, gender, browser used, purchase behavior, language, or industry type, which cannot be done using the preset audience segmentation options available in PageSense. Furthermore, the option allows you to create a more powerful combination of audience groups using the ‘AND’ and ‘OR’ operations.

Say, for example, you run an ecommerce website and you want to A/B test the revamped product pages to visitors coming only from the United States region AND who access your website using Desktop devices. This could easily be done by manually creating custom audience conditions in PageSense as explained below:
  1. Click the +Custom Audience button on the AUDIENCE page of your experiment.

  2. Enter a title and description for the custom segment you want to create.

  3. From the Segment dropdown, choose the modifier and value for the selected audience segment as shown in the screenshot. Learn more about the different types of custom audience segments and the modifier conditions available in PageSense. 


  4. Ensure you choose the condition as ‘AND’ or 'OR' depending on the segment you want to create.

  5. From the Segment dropdown, choose the second modifier and value for the selected audience segment as shown in the screenshot.
    The final selection looks like:

  6. Click the Save Audience button.
    The saved segment will appear under the Custom Segments section across all of your experiments in PageSense and you can apply the same for any experiment.
Below are a few examples that show you the most effective ways to define custom audiences in PageSense for running your experiments better:

Target your experiment by geographical location
If you're looking to expand your online business to international audiences and want to understand which city or country markets are good for your business, choose to target your experiments to audiences based on the location.

Targeting your experiment by your visitors' geographic location, such as country, city, or region, is a powerful option when you want to show personalized web page content or run advertisement campaigns that match the interest of audiences from specific areas. This type of targeting is driven by factors like local festivals celebrated, popular regional news, tourism attractions, or business events happening in a region.

For example, say you own an ecommerce site, and you want to show personalized product recommendations to visitors from United Kingdom during the Christmas season. In this case, you can create a custom audience segment that targets your experiment page to visitors from this particular location as shown in the screenshot below.


Note: You can also use this option to target your experiment based on the languages spoken by visitors in different countries.

Target your experiment by query parameters
While running ad campaigns, it's important to both target the right consumers and provide the most relevant information to them on your website. If you find the right user who clicks on your ad, but the landing page for that ad isn’t customized, that conversion could be lost.

Targeting your experiment to visitors who reach your website pages that include (or exclude) a certain query string in their URLs could be useful when you want to understand the effectiveness of different ad campaigns on your website. This is usually tied to audiences who come through a specific utm_source like Facebook or Google and utm_campaigns like paid ads, Google Adwords, and more.

For example, say you own an online car dealership website and you want to redirect customers who click on a paid ad campaign with the utm_campaign=luxurycars to a landing page displaying luxury vehicles with prices and offers. For this, you can create a custom audience segment that explicitly targets your landing pages to visitors who contain this particular query string as shown in the screenshot below.


Target your experiment by user information
To achieve a specific goal or purpose of your online business, you will sometimes need to target your experiment to visitors with exact custom attributes such as age, email address, subscription plan, fields of interest, gender, marital status, or job role on your website. These attributes or visitor information can be collected when a user completes a form on your website, such as a signup, contact, purchase, or any other sort.

Targeting your experiment to visitors based on specific user attributes can help deliver the right message to the right audience and improve brand experience with ease. This is also considered the most precise method of audience targeting as it makes visitors stand out from the wide segment of users on your site.
 
For example, let's say you run a SaaS business and you want to show a personalized pricing page that offers an additional 30-day period to visitors who are subscribed to the Premium plan. In this case, you can create a custom audience segment to target your experiment to visitors who match this specific user attribute and value as shown in the screenshot below.
 
Note that to use 'user information' in audience targeting, you need to add an additional code snippet to your experiment page as explained in the steps here.

Target your experiment by weather/climatic conditions
Do you see your website sell more products when the temperature rises? Or does your tourism business attract more new bookings during cooler seasons?
 
Targeting your experiment based on the local weather of the visitors coming to your website is another modern technique used by marketers to craft influential website content, product pages, and ad campaigns. Weather-based audience targeting allows businesses to anticipate patterns of demand and tap into the needs and purchase intentions of customers during different seasons of the year. It's also a great way to gain a competitive advantage and increase the average value of orders and conversions on a website.
 
For example, say you run an ecommerce site and want to create a personalized homepage title for visitors living in climatic zones with temperatures below 41°F/5°C. In this case, you can create a custom audience segment to target your personalization experience based on audience's local weather as shown in the screenshot below.


Target your experiment by visitor activity
Visitors coming to your website will have different intentions and behaviors. For example, some might be looking to subscribe to your newsletter, some might be checking out new product releases, and others might just be there for window shopping or research purposes. If you're going to show the same home/landing page content to all visitors, you're definitely going to lose conversions and sales.

Targeting your experiment based on what pages your visitor interacts with on your site and what actions they take (or do not take) can be a great way to provide a personalized website experience during their next visit. This includes buttons clicked, products viewed, items bought, and other actions your visitor performs, revealing what your audience wants, avoids, and purchases. 

Using such specific visitor metrics, you can learn why specific actions or events on the site were not successful and later reach customers with more apt content or product offers based on their current activity.
 
For example, say you run an online tourism website and want to provide customized tourist packages with attractive coupon codes to customers who viewed the Adventure tourism package but exited your web page without completing a booking. In this case, you can create a custom audience segment to target your experiment for these segments of visitor interest and behavior as shown in the screenshot below. 

Note that to use 'visitor activity' in audience targeting, you need to add an additional code snippet to your experiment page as explained in the steps here.


Currently, weather-, user-, and visitor-activity-based audience targeting options are only available for personalization experiments in PageSense. However, the user and visitor activity(custom dimensions) based segmentation option is available under report filtering across all of the experiments in PageSense except for push notifications. Learn how to filter reports based on custom dimensions.

Target your experiment by specific referral site URLs
Depending on the ways you market your website online, you'll likely have numerous different referral sources. Analyzing which source brings in more traffic and revenue to your business is a surefire way to get more traffic from multiple channels. Targeting your experiment based on referral URLs—sources that your visitors came from, such as Facebook, Google, Twitter, Quora, influencer blogs, and other external sites—can help you promote your website and products on these specific channels. 
 
For example, say you own an ecommerce site, and you want your experiment to only target visitors referred by 'facebook.com'. In this case, you can create a custom audience segment to target visitors from this specific Referral site as shown in the screenshot below. 

 
Bonus tip: Have no clear target audience in mind to run your experiments? Or don't know how to decide where to start when segmenting a target customer audience? Consider these points in choosing the right target audience segments:
  • Do you have seasonal-only customers or customers who are only interested in certain types of products, services, or events?
  • Are you an organization that needs to send different content to partners, sponsors, users, or other patrons?
  • Does it matter if your contacts are local, domestic, or international?
  • Have you thought about the requirements of users based on different weather conditions?
Was that useful? Please leave us your comment/feedback in the comment box below.

Are you looking to create a new custom audience segment to target in your experiment but aren't sure how to implement it? Just write to us at support@zohopagesense.com and we will be happy to guide you.

Start learning. Start customizing!

    • Recent Topics

    • SEO for your Zoho Sites Website

      Join our live webinar to learn how to use Zoho Sites' SEO tools to boost your website's ranking. Our product specialist will demonstrate everything you need to know about optimizing your web pages to make them search engine friendly. Register here for free: https://www.zoho.com/sites/webinars/

    • Importing into Multiselect Picklist

      Hi, We just completed a trade show and one of the bits of information we collect is tool style. The application supplied by the show set this up as individual questions. For example, if the customer used Thick Turret and Trumpf style but not Thin Turret,

    • New 2026 Application Themes

      Love the new themes - shame you can't get a little more granular with the colours, ie 3 different colours so one for the dropdown menu background. Also, I did have our logo above the application name but it appears you can't change logo placement position

    • Add line item numbers to sales order/invoice creation page

      It would be really helpful if there were line numbers visible as we are creating a sales order and/or invoice. There are line numbers visible in the PDF once the sales order is created. I would like to be able to see the line numbers as I am building

    • API to Apply Retainer invoice payment to Invoice

      Hi Team, I could not find  API to apply the Retainer invoice payment to existing Invoice. Can you please help ? Attaching the screenshot

    • Reconciling a month with no transactions

      I'm treasurer for a small non profit cemetery association and I'm trying to reconcile a bank statement for a month that did not have any transactions. Do I skip the month entirely and go a month with transactions?

    • push notification to Cliq when user is @mentioned in CRM notes

      push notification to Cliq when user is @mentioned in CRM notes. Currently users that is @mentioned gets an email to be notified. User/s that is @mentioned should get a Cliq notification.

    • Customize your Booking page using Zia

      We’re excited to introduce an AI-based enhancement that automatically customizes your booking page effortlessly. By simply providing your business website URL, Zoho Bookings can automatically design a booking page that matches or complements your brand

    • Multiple header in the quote table???

      Hello, Is it possible in Zoho CRM to add multiple headers or sections within the Quote product table, so that when the quote is printed it shows separate sections (for example “Products” and “Services”)? To clarify, I’m asking because: This does not appear

    • Feature Request: Render Markdown (.md) files in Zoho Cliq

      Hi, We regularly share Markdown (.md) files in Zoho Cliq. However, when we open these files in Cliq, the content does not render as Markdown—it displays as plain text. This forces us to copy/paste the content into an external Markdown viewer to read it

    • Zoho Workdrive download was block by security software

      Hi Team, Recently workdrive download was blocked by huorong security. Could you please advise how to put zoho workdrive as white list? every time we put "*.zohoexternal.com" or "workdrive.zohoexternal.com", the warning msg will still pop in next dow

    • Merged cells are unmerging automatically

      Hello, I have been using Zoho sheets from last 1 year. But from last week facing a issue in merged cells. While editing all merged cells in a sheet became unmerged. I merged it again, but it again unmerged. In my half an hour work I have to do this 3-4

    • Zoho mail to contacts and leads, but not to accounts?

      We use the accounts tab a lot for our business because they can be linked to the sales orders. Now we want to use the mail add on to link communication of our emails to our accounts. However this is only possible for contacts and leads? It would be convenient

    • API keys not showing in ZeptoMail dashboard

      Hi there, I'm hoping someone can provide some assistance as support isn't replying. I am trying to configure my transactional emails, but the dashboard doesn't show any of my API details - the `div` is there but it's emtpy. Every time I click "Generate

    • Does Zoho Learn integrate with Zoho Connect,People,Workdrive,Project,Desk?

      Can we propose Zoho LEarn as a centralised Knowledge Portal tool that can get synched with the other Zoho products and serve as a central Knowledge repository?

    • Reading from and writing to Zoho Projects Custom Module with Deluge

      Does anyone know if there is a way to read from and write to the Custom Modules that Zoho now supports. I would love to be able to loop through a set of data and create the entities I need to for this new custom module I'm looking to put together.

    • How Does Knowledge Base Search and Article Recommendation Work?

      Hello, I would like to understand how the Knowledge Base search engine works. Specifically, does it search based on: The article title only? The full article content? Both, the article and the content? Keywords? Tags? Also, how does the system determine

    • Zoho Books/Inventory - Restrict Items With Pricebook

      Hi Zoho Team, I'm trying to address as use case where a client needs to restrict which products certain customers can purchase. I have been able to find a way to do this based on the current Zoho Books or Zoho Inventory configuation. My feature request

    • Best Way to Integrate Zoho Campaigns with Amazon SES Without Third-Party Tools

      I am looking for the most seamless and efficient method to integrate Zoho Campaigns with Amazon SES. My goal is to avoid using any third-party automation tools like Zapier, Make, or Pabbly, and instead, leverage Zoho's native capabilities for this integration.

    • Release Notes | January 2026

      We have rolled out a set of powerful new enhancements across Zoho Vertical Studio that bring several long-awaited capabilities to your applications. These updates focus on deeper customization, smarter automation, better reporting, and improved usability

    • scope for phonebridge in CRM and phonebridge API documentation

      Hi I cannot find the scope to be used for phonebridge in CRM API V2 calls. I am getting OAUTH_SCOPE_MISMATCH for scope group ZohoCRM.modules.ALL,ZohoCRM.setttings.ALL Also I am not able to locate the documentation for the same, All I have is phonebridge API documentation for desk and url [ https://www.zohoapis.com/crm/v2/phonebridge/ ] from a web forum. It makes a reply and error in case of missing arguments, but scope error is returned when all arguments are provided. Regards Devel Dev

    • How to charge Convenience fee OR payment gateway charges to the end client who is paying the invoice?

      Hello, I am creating this topic after having discussions with various sets of users and have understood that with people moving more and more to digital payments, it is important for the client to enable the "Convenience fee" kind of scenario. I have

    • Card payment surcharge?

      Hi, I would like to offer my customers the ability to pay invoices by card (using the PayPal integration). However, PayPal charges me around 5% to receive a card payment, and I would like to pass on this cost to my customer by way of a card payment surcharge. Is there any way for Zoho Invoice to be set up to automatically add a defined "card processing fee", say 5% of the invoice total, if the customer elects to pay by card? I don't want to add this on to invoice manually, since most of my clients

    • Automate Credit Card Surcharge

      Is there a way to create an automation that will add a 3.0% credit card surcharge to a subscription whenever a customer pays via credit card?

    • Zoho Books | Product updates | January 2026

      Hello users, We’ve rolled out new features and enhancements in Zoho Books. From e-filing Form 1099 directly with the IRS to corporation tax support, explore the updates designed to enhance your bookkeeping experience. E-File Form 1099 Directly With the

    • Zoho POS App Hanging Issue – Sales Becoming Difficult

      The Zoho POS app frequently hangs and becomes unresponsive during billing, making it very difficult to complete sales smoothly. This commonly happens while adding items, during checkout, or at payment time, especially during peak hours. These issues cause

    • Tip #62- Exploring Technician Console: Send Ctrl + Alt + Del- 'Insider Insights'

      Hello Zoho Assist Community! This week, we’ll be exploring the Send Ctrl + Alt + Del option in the Technician Console. Let’s jump right in. System administrators often rely on Ctrl + Alt + Del when managing remote devices that have unresponsive applications

    • SKUs for Invoices, POs, etc.

      It doesn't appear that one can enable SKU display on invoices, POs, etc. This is problematic, and I don't see a good reason why this shouldn't be an option. Some of our vendors and customers use this in their system. Every other identifier code is available

    • how to avoid duplicate customer

      How can i avoid to create a duplicate customer. I charged a same customer with two different plans and it showed up twice in my customer list and subsequently in Zoho books contacts. It creates confusion to have a same customer appears multiple times in customer or contact list. How can i avoid it.

    • RSC Connectivity Linkedin Recruiter RPS

      It seems there's a bit of a push from Linkedin Talent Solutions to keep integrations moving. My Account Manager confirmed that Zoho Recruit is a Certified Linkedin Linkedin Partner but does not have RSC as of yet., (we knew that :-) She encouraged me

    • im facing issue on generate the Estimate price

      i couldn't understand what is the issue , i cant generate Estimate price where is the issue

    • cannot be able to add user

      Dear team I tried to add a new user for sales team, but after entering the OTP its showing error message cannot add now

    • Changing an existing item to different accounts & inventory-tracked

      Hi everyone, I have an item in Zoho Books that was originally set up as a non-inventory item. Over time, I associated it with different sales and purchase accounts, and I now have many invoices, bills, and reports that use this item. My business process

    • How do I edit the Calendar Invite notifications for Interviews in Recruit?

      I'm setting up the Zoho Recruit Interview Calendar system but there's some notifications I don't have any control over. I've turned off all Workflows and Automations related to the Calendar Scheduling and it seems that it's the notification that is sent

    • Bookings duration - days

      Hi team, Is there any way to setup services/bookings that span multiple days? I am using Zoho Bookings for meeting room bookings. Clients may wish to book a room for more than one day, for up to a month.  If not, is there a plan to allow services to be setup with durations of Days as well as hours and minutes? Many thanks, Anna.

    • big 5 accounts

      how do you find what accounts are listed as Big 5 ?

    • Zoho recruit's blueprint configuration is not functioning as mapped

      Current Status: Zoho Blueprint is not functioning as configured. Issue: We are moving a Candidate status in Zoho Recruit "for active file" but we encountered: "Status cannot be changed for records involved in Blueprint." This happens to various client

    • Actual vs Minimum

      Hi all, I am sure I am not the only one having this need. We are implementing billing on a 30-minute increment, with a minimum of 30 minutes per ticket. My question is, is there a way to create a formula or function to track both the minimum bill vs the

    • Delay in rendering Zoho Recruit - Careers in the ZappyWorks

      I click on the Careers link (https://zappyworks.zohorecruit.com/jobs/Careers) on the ZappyWorks website expecting to see the job openings. The site redirects me to Zoho Recruit, but after the redirect, the page just stays blank for several seconds. I'm

    • How to add interviews through API

      I'm trying to add an interview without much luck. The documentation gives examples of adding just about everything except an interview. However, the issue might be the way I'm formatting it, because the documentation is unclear to me. It seems as if the xml should be passed in the url, which seems unusual. I've tried the data as both plain and character escaped, but nothing seems to work, nor do I even get an error response. https://recruit.zoho.com/recruit/private/xml/Interviews/addRecords?authtoken=***&scope=recruitapi&version=2&xmlData=<Interviews> <row

    • Next Page