What's targeting?

Targeting is a way to focus changes on a particular group of visitors to your site. With targeting, you can narrowly execute marketing and merchandising decisions for only visitors who meet certain criteria or have specific characteristics.

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You use rules to make changes

Changes that you make to your site through the Bloomreach Dashboard are done through rules. For example, if you want to redirect keyword searches that use a certain search term, then you create a rule.

As you work with targeted changes, you're managing rules to make your changes just like any other change. When you create or edit a rule, you have the opportunity to stipulate that the changes caused by your rule affect only a certain audience.

Click the Refine by Audience dropdown and select an audience option to see a list of rules that apply to that audience.

When should I use targeting?

People use targeting when they want to affect their site's visitor experience for only some visitors.

You might decide to launch an email campaign to go with a particular designer's product launch, but you only want to send that email to customers who have previously purchased items from you. Or maybe your Marketing department created a home page for people visiting your site from a specific geographic region. Some organizations create ranking rules that affect only site visitors with certain characteristics.

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Best practices

We recommend that you 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 Bloomreach Dashboard where you want to make changes, such as a keyword redirect rule or a banner. Targeting is simply an option that you can use when making changes to your site that you want to affect only certain visitors.

To target a change, click the Audience dropdown list and select the group of site visitors whom you want to target. That's it! You can continue creating your promotion, rule, or other change. When you enable your change, Bloomreach automatically targets it at your chosen audience.

Anytime you see the Audience dropdown list, then you know that you can target whatever change you're making for a specific group of visitors.

I don't see an audience that I want to target

That's okay. You get to define exactly the audience that you want. Only the people who meet your specific criteria can be in your new audience. 

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Best practices

Before you define an audience, consider the kinds of changes that you anticipate for the audience. You can only assign one audience to a change, so the definition needs to include all the dimensions that describe the site visitors that you want to target.

Start at the Audience Setup screen. You get there by selecting the Merchandsing audiences menu at the left of the Bloomreach Dashboard. Click the New Audience button in the upper right corner.

Give your new audience a name, then use the dropdown lists to set the specific dimensions of the audience. Click the Save button in the upper right corner when you're finished.

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Dimensions are like attributes

You can think of dimensions as collections of attributes that describe specific characteristics of audience members. Click the select a dimension dropdown to see a list of the dimensions that you can configure for an audience. You might see the other dropdown lists change or text fields appear, depending on which dimension you select. Just use the lists and fields to set values for each dimension that you want to be part of this audience.