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

    • Subir o Preço Unitário já acrescido de um valor

      To com um desafio grande, e se alguém conseguir me ajudar, seria ótimo! O que eu preciso é que o na hora de adicionar um item no subformulário dos itens cotados do módulo Orçamentos, o preço de lista do item venha acrescido de 20% automaticamente e de
    • Ring in the New Year with Guided Conversations for Smooth Offline Support

      As we step into the new year, it’s time to refocus, re-energize, and gear up for fresh opportunities. But what about your customers as they begin the year with their own set of challenges or queries to resolve? With Zoho Desk’s Guided Conversations (GC),
    • Exploring SalesIQ's Top Features of 2024: An Insider's Look 🔍

      As we wrap up another year at Zoho SalesIQ, it's time to reflect on how far we've come. This year has been incredible for us in our journey to build a more powerful, flexible, and customer-centric engagement platform. We've introduced several features
    • updateTask Zoho Connect API

      When I do POST request by https://connect.zoho.com/pulse/api/updateTask with parameters scopeID, taskId, title, status and with header Zoho-oauthtoken, I got next response: {'updateTask': {'reason': 'You are not authorized to do this action.', 'result':
    • Alert for Back Navigation in Zoho Creator Widgets on Mobile Apps

      In Zoho Creator widgets, when a user navigates back on mobile devices, the data within the widget is reset. This leads to a loss of any unsaved changes or inputs, causing frustration for users. To enhance user experience, we need to implement a confirmation
    • Can Creator integrate with a CRM Sandbox

      zoho & Creator Noob -  I would like to build a Creator App and integrate it to the CRM Sandbox.  Then, when I have the bugs worked out integrate it to the production CRM account.  Can Creator do this ?  I built a test Creator App and integrated it to the CRM in a test zoho account fairly easily.  
    • Allow Multiple Scheduled Appointments with Zoho Support

      Dear Zoho Team, I hope you're doing well. First, thank you for introducing the option to schedule support calls via the Zoho CRM booking link. This has been a fantastic enhancement, eliminating the need for back-and-forth coordination when scheduling
    • Zia Call Intelligence only up 10 License

      I have been trying to install Call Intelligence for two days now, but strangely, the button is missing at this point. The documentation could be better, but most importantly, someone should inform small businesses like us that they don’t even bother enabling
    • Accrue Leave by Hours Worked?

      My locality (Michigan, US) has enacted a law that requires that 1 hour of sick leave be accrued for every 30 hours worked. I cannot see how to implement this policy in Zoho People. There does not appear to be a mechanism for accruing leave proportional
    • Fixed assets recording

      Hello there, I recorded a bill for a vendor contain (Computer) so the PC is a fixed assets, do I need to do a manual journal to include this PC under the fixed assets category (furniture & equipment)? If yes, please take me through the manual journal
    • error in importing customers

      get this error message while importing customers, there is no column for COUNTRY CODE in sample excel file
    • Workflow Based on Manual Journal

      Manual journal entries are one of the few areas that cannot kick off a workflow automation in Zoho Books currently. I would propose considering adding that. My use case is that the payroll provider I use (a flavor of SurePayroll) has a Zoho Books automation
    • Digest Décembre - Un résumé de ce qui s'est passé le mois dernier sur Community

      Bonjour chers utilisateurs, Toute l'équipe Zoho france vous souhaite une année remplie de joie, de réussite et de prospérité. Alors que nous débutons cette nouvelle année avec des projets innovants, des astuces, des produits et bien d'autres choses encore,
    • New Year Wishes to the Zoho Finance Developer Community!

      Hello developers, Happy New Year! As we step into 2025, we wish you a journey filled with growth, success, and exciting opportunities ahead. We’re thrilled to announce that we have something exciting in store for you. Welcome to the Zoho Finance Developer
    • Button Display Conditions

      Hi Guys, Is it at all possible to have extra button conditions? Context: We have data in our deals module which has a custom button which converts the deal into contacts + set up relationships between them. At the end of the conversion we set a field
    • Ayuda con zoho creator x zoho Crm

      Hola a todos, Estoy teniendo dificultades al sincronizar datos entre Zoho Creator y Zoho CRM. Mi objetivo es lo siguiente: Busque un registro en el módulo Contactsde Zoho CRM utilizando el correo electrónico del registro de Zoho Creator. Si se encuentra
    • How to Replace an Assessment in a Job Opening on Zoho Recruit

      Hi everyone, I’m currently using Zoho Recruit and would like to replace the assessment linked to a specific job opening. I want to remove the existing assessment and add a new one. What is the best way to do this without losing any important data or affecting
    • Fixed asset management

      I want to know if there is any individual module for fixed assets management
    • Input GST Reversal for damaged goods

      In our line of business, some items are damaged and we are doing inventory adjustments to remove them from stock. However, as per GST guidelines, there is a specific rule that we have to reverse Input GST availed for such items and needs to be reported
    • Introducing Record Summary: smarter insights at your fingertips

      Hello everyone, Building on the recent launch of Zoho's in-house Zia Large Language Model (Zia LLM)—a major milestone in Zoho CRM’s AI capabilities—we’re excited to introduce the Record Summary feature. This powerful addition makes use of Zia LLM to simplify
    • No longer get Cliq notifications on phone if app not started

      On Android, I used to get notifications on my phone whether I was in the app, or it was started. Then about a month ago, I stopped seeing notifications on my phone UNLESS I had already started the app. So if I reboot my phone, and never start the app,
    • Error AS101 when adding new email alias

      Hi, I am trying to add apple@(mydomain).com The error AS101 is shown while I try to add the alias.
    • Deluge script to add Mail Task

      Has anyone out there created a custom function to create a Zoho Mail task? I'd be interested in hearing how you accomplished it. Sample code is appreciated!
    • Tags with Zapier

      Maybe I'm missing something....I hope so... Using tags for triggers is a key need.  This prevents us from having a ton of different lists. I am trying to find out how to add a tag using zapier when someone makes a purchase....but it doesn't seem to be
    • Send Supervisor Rule Emails Within Ticket Context in Zoho Desk

      Dear Zoho Desk Team, I hope this message finds you well. Currently, emails sent via Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk are sent outside of the ticket context. As a result, if a client replies to such emails, their response creates a new ticket instead of appending
    • How to apply blueprint on tickets that created from IM module

      Hello, I have an issue applying blueprint on tickets that created from WhatsApp conversation, the tickets matches with the blueprint criteria but still we are not able to put these tickets into the blueprint. I've tried with deferent type of tickets and
    • Function #4: Schedule Customer Statements

      Regularly sending statements to customers is an imperative part of many business processes as it helps foster strong customer relationships and provides timely guidance on payments. While you can generate the statement of accounts and have it sent over
    • Zoho Mail POP & IMAP Server Details

      Hello all! We have been receiving a number of requests regarding the errors while configuring or using Zoho Mail account in POP/ IMAP clients. The server details vary based on your account type and the Datacenter in which your account is setup. Ensure
    • Remove 30-Day Client Reply Restriction on Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk

      Dear Zoho Desk Team, I hope you're doing well. Currently, Supervisor Rules in Zoho Desk run once every hour but only apply to tickets that have received a customer response within the past 30 days. This restriction creates challenges for us, as we have
    • Paid Support Plans with Automated Billing

      We (like many others, I'm sure) are designing or have paid support plans. Our design involves a given number of support hours in each plan. Here are my questions: 1) Are there any plans to add time-based plans in the Zoho Desk Support Plans feature? The
    • Contacts Don't Always Populate

      I've noticed that some contacts can easily be added to an email when I type their name. Other times, a contact doesn't appear even though I KNOW it is in my contact list. It is possible the ones I loaded from a spreadsheet are not an issue and the ones
    • How to get NSE/BSE Stock Prices in Zoho sheets?

      I've been looking for a function that provides me with the NSE/BSE listed stocks price in Zoho Sheets like GOOGLEFINANCE in Google sheets, but I found none. Please help if there is any way to het stock prices?
    • Tip #5: Setting access rights at the subfolder level

      Hello everyone, We hope you're finding our WorkDrive Tips and Tricks series useful. For today's tip, we'll teach you how to assign higher subfolder permissions to Team Folder members. Team Folders helps you avoid the drawbacks of traditional file sharing.
    • Cannot edit email text in Zoho Form rules

      I have a number of rules set up on a form depending on a user's submission. For some reason, I am no longer able to edit the content of the emails sent out based on those rules. I am invited to "use the advanced editor", but the original text of the email
    • Re-emitir facturas con nueva dirección de facturación

      Hola, necesito saber si es posible que las facturas ya emitidas, pueden ser re-emitidas con el cambio de dirección de facturación, realizado el día de hoy 02-01-2025, para efectos contables. Espero su ayuda, Gracias
    • Can multiple agents be assigned to one ticket on purpose?

      Is it possible to assign one ticket to two or more agents at a time? I would like the option to have multiple people working on one ticket so that the same ticket is viewable for those agents on their list of pending tickets. Is something like this currently
    • For security reasons your account has been blocked as you have exceeded the maximum number of requests per minute that can originate from one account.

      Hello Zoho Even if we open 10-15 windows in still we are getting our accounts locked with error " For security reasons your account has been blocked as you have exceeded the maximum number of requests per minute that can originate from one account. "
    • how can I hide this Module?

      Hi everyone, newbie question. how can I hide the "Sales Order" column? when I try I get this message: https://imghostr.com/86395c_p7j
    • UI Arabic

      can i change the member portal UI to arabic in zoho community?
    • Domain verification is in progress... (How long do I need to wait?)

      Trying to setup my first email domain by connecting with GoDaddy. Have been here for quite some time and the screen is not changing. How long should this take?Send DataSend Data
    • Next Page