Audience targeting allows you to display website experiences to a subset of consumers who share common behavioural or demographic characteristics.
This article breaks down audience targeting into the following topics:
What is an Audience?
How are Consumers Assigned to an Audience?
How do I Choose Which Audiences to Enable for Personalisation on my website?
How do I Start Targeting Audiences in YCP?
How do I Measure the Impact of Audience-Specific Experiences?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an Audience?
Yieldify has created 50+ audiences using Epsilon’s best-in-class identity product COREID®, which identifies over 600 characteristics in consumers.
Audiences fall into the following categories:
Here are a few example audiences Yieldify can identify:
Gen X: Consumers who are between 41 and 59 years old.
Brand-Driven Shoppers: Consumers who are likely to make purchases driven by brand names and brand loyalty.
Middle Income Households: Consumers who are part of households that have a yearly income between $50,000 and $149,999.
Bargain Shoppers: Consumers who are likely to actively seek price incentives, use coupons or make purchases based on what’s on sale.
Parents: Consumers who are parents.
Fitness Enthusiasts: Consumers who are likely to have a fitness membership or have a home gym.
Personal Care Product Buyers: Consumers who are likely to be interested in purchasing personal care products online.
Socially Influenced Consumers: Consumers who are likely to be influenced to purchase via social media activity.
How are Consumers Assigned to an Audience?
Yieldify assigns consumers to audiences based on the demographics characteristics associated with their email address within Epsilon’s identity product COREID®.
Here is a step-by-step breakdown of the audience assignment process:
When Yieldify identifies a consumer’s email address on a website ;
Yieldify instantly sends the hashed email (encrypted for privacy and security) to Epsilon’s identity service through an API call. Epsilon’s API returns to Yieldify all the demographic characteristics it has collected about that consumer ;
If the consumer’s characteristics match one of the audiences enabled for the website, they will be exposed to all the audience-specific experiences live on-site.
Note that if the consumer matches more than one of the audiences enabled for your website, that consumer will be randomly assigned to one of the audiences such that they are exposed to cohesive messaging.
Yieldify does not store the audiences to which a consumer belongs to in its database. This means that a consumer is assigned to an audience for the duration of their session, and will be reassigned every future session.
How do I Choose Which Audiences to Enable for Personalisation on my website?
Upon your request your Account Manager will walk you through the 10 most relevant audiences for your website. Together you can agree on which audiences to enable for personalisation by taking into consideration:
Your website's CRO objectives
Audience match rates*
Strategies that best leverage audience targeting
Yieldify requires a random sample of 10,000 consumer email addresses collected by your website in the last 6 months to identify the 10 most relevant audiences.
*An audience’s match rate represents the percentage of the website’s consumer emails that fall into that audience, for the tested sample.
How do I Start Targeting Audiences in YCP?
Audience targeting is accessible from the ‘Rules’ page of the Campaign Builder Beta – previously the ‘Targets’ page on the Legacy Builder.
Let’s take as an example a website that has enabled 2 audiences:
Athleisure Enthusiasts
Bargain Shoppers
Follow these steps to target an audience with an experience:
1.Once a website has enabled at least one audience, a new section will appear in the top left corner of the ‘Rules’ page
2. By default, a campaign will target all users unless an audience is selected. Click “Edit audience” to target an audience with a campaign
3. A panel will appear, allowing you to select the audience you want to target. Once selected, click apply.
4. The selected audience will be highlighted under the Audience section. To change target another audience or target all users, click ‘Edit audience’.
5. The audience targeted by this campaign is then highlighted on the Review page - both in the Campaign Builder and on the campaign Edit & Review page accessible from the dashboard.
How do I Measure the Impact of Audience-Specific Experiences?
For each strategy, Yieldify recommends creating one experience for an audience and one fallback experience for those consumers who do not fall into any audience.
The fallback experience contains a variant with generic personalisation, whereas the audience experience contains a variant with audience-specific personalisation.
To measure the impact of an audience-specific experience, it should be composed of:
1 control group
1 fallback variant (copy of the variant from the fallback experience)
1 audience variant
The control group allows us to validate the impact of the audience variant on the website, by comparing the revenue or conversion rate uplift generated by users who saw the experience, compared to those who have not.
The fallback variant allows us to validate the impact of audience-specific personalisation, compared to generic personalisation. Our hypothesis is that consumers who are part of the bargain shoppers audience will respond better to audience-specific personalisation than to generic personalisation.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long a consumer is assigned to a specific audience?
Yieldify does not store the audiences to which a consumer belongs to in its database. This means that a consumer is assigned to an audience for the duration of their session, and will be reassigned every future session.
Can I target multiple audiences?
It’s currently only possible to target one audience per experience.
Creating an AND statement across multiple audiences creates a niche target that limits reach considerably.
Creating an OR statement across multiple audiences runs the risk of creating generic personalisation. However, if a use case for this arises please send a product request.