Merchandising audiences

What are Merchandising audiences?

Merchandising audiences let you focus changes on a specific group of visitors to your site. With Merchandising audiences, you narrowly apply marketing and merchandising decisions to only the visitors who meet certain criteria or share specific characteristics.

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You make changes to your site through rules. For example, to redirect searches that use a certain term, you create a rule.
When you work with targeted changes, you manage rules the same way you manage any other change. When you create or edit a rule, you can specify that the changes from your rule affect only a certain audience.

To see the rules that apply to a given audience, click the Refine by audience dropdown and select an audience.

When should I use Merchandising audiences?

Use Merchandising audiences to shape the visitor experience for only some of your visitors.

For example, you might launch an email campaign for a designer's product launch and send it only to customers who have purchased from you before. Your marketing team might build a homepage for visitors from a specific region. Or you might create ranking rules that affect only visitors with certain characteristics.

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Test the effectiveness of your targeted changes just as you do for site-wide changes.

How do I start?

You can start anywhere in the dashboard where you make changes, such as a keyword redirect rule or a banner.

To target a change at a specific group of visitors, click the Audience dropdown and select the group you want to target. You can select more than one audience for a single rule, so you can combine existing audiences instead of defining a new one for each change. You can then continue creating your promotion, rule, or other change. When you enable your change, it automatically applies to your chosen audiences.

Manage your audiences

The Merchandising audiences module gives you one place to create, review, and maintain every audience defined for your site.

From the audience list page, you can:

Select multiple audiences and apply bulk operations to them, which cuts repetitive work when you manage large sets of audiences.
Filter the list by a rule's influence over different sites, if you have a multi-site account.

Define a new audience

You can define a precise audience so that only people who meet your criteria belong to it.

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You can assign more than one audience to a change, so you don't need to pack every characteristic into a single audience. Instead, define focused, reusable audiences—for example, one per region or one per device type—and select as many as you need on each change.

To define an audience:

Go to the Merchandising audiences module in the dashboard. The audience list page opens.
Click + New audience.
On the audience setup page, name your audience.
Set the dimensions of the audience. Dimensions are collections of attributes that describe characteristics of audience members.
1. Click the Select a dimension dropdown to see the dimensions you can configure.
2. Use the lists and fields to set values for each dimension you want to include.
3. Click + Add dimension to add more dimensions.
Click Save in the upper-right corner.

For the full walkthrough, including the OR operator and multiple dimensions, read Defining audiences for targeted changes.

Updated 4 days ago

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