Custom Audiences (UTMs, Referring Domains, and Geo-targeting)

This article discusses our Custom Audiences feature, which enables advanced targeting ans segmentation capabilities based on UTM and query parameters, referring domains, and geography. Custom audiences are available on Advanced and Pro plans only.

Audiences in Shoplift are customizable segments of website visitors that are constructed by creating rules around various parameters, like UTMs, URL strings or query strings, referring domains, and countries.

In Shoplift, you can create and use custom audiences, which are segments constructed from your own rules, or use common audiences, which are popular segments created by Shoplift that are ready-to-use.

Below is a guide on how to use both custom audiences and common audiences to more narrowly define the targeting for your tests.

Adding audiences to your test

On the test draft page, you will see an "Audience targeting" section that allows you to add various audiences to your test to define targeting in more advanced and customizable ways than device or visitor targeting provides.

To add an audience to your test, click the "Add audiences" button. This will open the "My audiences" window, where you can create and manage your audiences and select them to be included in your test.

The "My audiences" window is divided into two types of audiences: custom audiences and common audiences. By default, you will not have any custom audiences, because you need to create them.

If you don't have advanced or specific use cases, you can use the provided common audiences to narrow the targeting of your test to common visitor segments, like visitors from paid media channels, search channels, specific referring domains like Facebook or Google, or even common countries like the United States or Canada.

To add an audience to your test, select the checkbox and click "Done."

Create a custom audience

To create your first custom audience, click "Create" in the My audiences window. A audience editor will open where you can define the rules for your new audience, name your audience, and save it for reuse.

Constructing audience rules

From the audience editor, you can add various rules and combinations of custom logic to define targeting for your test. Rules are created by selecting a "dimension" (like UTMs, URL strings, or referring domains), selecting an "operator" (like "contains," "equals", or "starts with") and entering a value. Below is a list of the dimensions currently provided:

• utm_source: a parameter and value specified in your ad campaign links, typically constructed to provide the ad platform or website, like "facebook," "tiktok," or "google."

• utm_medium: a parameter and value specified in your ad campaign links, typically constructed to provide the type of ad platform of website, like "social," "paidsocial," "search," or "cpc" (cost-per-click).

• utm_campaign: a parameter and value specified in your ad campaign links, typically constructed to provide the name or title of the specific ad campaign, like "black-friday-sale."

• utm_content: a parameter and value specified in your ad campaign links, typically constructed to provide the name, title, or type of a specific ad, like "black-friday-video."

• URL string: can be any parameter or value that is present in your URL structure for the desired test page or location. For example, if your Google Ads provide a "gclid" parameter (Google Click ID), you can target your tests based on the presence or absence of this parameter.

• referring domain: can be any high-level domain that your website visitors are coming from, like "facebook.com" or "google.com".

• country: a list of all countries to use to refine your targeting

For example, if you wanted to restrict your test to show only to visitors coming from Facebook, then you could create a rule for "Referring domain contains facebook".

You can also chain different rules together. If you wanted to target Facebook visitors from Italy, for example, you could add a second rule to your audience that is "Country equals Italy".

In the above example, this test would now only show to Facebook visitors in Italy.

Add multiple audiences to a test

You can also add multiple audiences to your test, to expand the scope of your tested visitor segment. For example, if you wanted to run a test on an audience focused on specific Facebook visitors as well as an audience focused on specific TikTok users, you can add both your Facebook audience and your TikTok audience to your test.

The audiences will be added with "or" logic, which means that the test will be able to show to visitors in your Facebook audience or visitors in your TikTok audience.

FAQ: If I apply my variant on a test with audiences, will it affect all visitors?

When you apply your variant after running a test, all website visitors will be exposed to that variant experience. Audience segmentation will not continue after the test is ended and the variant is applied.