Audience targeting
When should I consider using audience targeting?
- When you want to show a particular placement only to a specific group of visitors (e.g., return customers).
- When you want to prevent some visitors from seeing a placement (e.g., high value customers, customers who bought tickets to a specific event, first time visitors).
- To only show a placement on certain devices (e.g., when serving a different experience on mobile and desktop).
- To only show a placement to visitors in certain countries.
- To serve a different placement experience for some visitors (e.g., most visitors see an overlay while a targeted group are shown an embedded placement).
How do I use audiences?
Targeting is set up at the page level by adding an audience to a page variant.
Restriction for variants with custom weighting
We recommend not adding granular targeting rules to placements when custom weighting has been selected as the traffic distribution method on your page. When targeting is applied within custom weighted variants, there is potential to exclude visitors from being shown a placement who might otherwise have been eligible if a different variant had been selected. This is because the selection of a variant occurs first without any consideration for the visitors eligibility to see the placements within the selected variant. This is necessary for Rokt to conduct a scientific split test and respect the defined selection weighting.
Variant A is given 60% weighting and holds an overlay placement for general visitors to your site with no targeting applied. Variant B has 10% weighting and holds an overlay placement targeting a list of event IDs. When Variant B is selected and the visitor does not match the targeting conditions, they don't see a placement at all, although they were eligible to see Variant A. This could represent a lost revenue opportunity on your page.
When does this pose a problem?
This could be problematic in situations where you want to be hyper-targeted in the placements you serve to visitors on your site, but also control traffic distribution when testing new variations of user experience. For example, you might consider running a different version of the overlay placement for mobile and desktop visitors, while simultaneously running tests controlled by a set allocation of traffic. This would require adding two overlay placements to a variant, one targeted to mobile devices and the other to desktop devices, and assigning the variant a selection weight. This configuration is not supported as overlay placements immediately load on the page.
Why do we prohibit multiple overlay placements within a variant?
Variants are restricted to a single overlay placement with automatic activation on page load. This is to protect the user experience by preventing a situation where two overlay placements are shown to a visitor on your site. Allowing multiple overlay placements involves more configuration in the setup of a variant to ensure that only one overlay is ever eligible to show.