Arc XP's Audience Targeting
What is Arc XP's Audience Targeting?
Arc XP’s Audience Targeting is an integrated, server-side targeting tool that allows users to easily build audiences leveraging out-of-the-box criteria and curate and deploy CDN-powered, tailored digital experiences using PageBuilder Editor. With Audience Targeting, users can:
Create and manage audiences in Delivery’s new Audience Manager using available out-of-the-box criteria, including country, device type, and cookies*.
Create, curate, and publish up to six possible visitor experiences for a single Page URL without developer support using PageBuilder Editor’s powerful curation and preview capabilities.
Apply audiences created in Delivery’s Audience Manager directly to your page variants without needing to leave PageBuilder Editor with the new Optimize Workspace.
View and manage all your targeted experiences from the new Audience Targeting Dashboard in PageBuilder Editor without any code change or development needed.
Note
Privacy laws such as GDPR and CCPA and others require that end users are provided with clear and concise information about the processing of their data and, for certain data/processing, choice about such processing.
As a data controller, you are responsible for compliance with such obligations, including, as applicable, providing notice of your data processing activities and obtaining legally required consent to the deployment of cookies and/or processing of personal data or providing and honoring legally required opt-outs of data processing.
Arc XP’s audience targeting allows you to segment your audience based on the delivery of cookies. Customers are responsible for using this cookie for Arc XP audience targeting in compliance with applicable laws and preferences you offer to users. Consult your legal counsel to determine if your implementation and use of audience segmentation comply with the legal and regulatory standards to which our organization is subject.
Audience Targeting and limitations
The following capabilities are available to all Arc XP clients as part of their existing Arc XP subscription.
Audience Targeting includes the following:
Audience Targeting can be enabled on a maximum of 1 website per organization.
Multi-site clients will be able to use this feature but must select which website to provide the feature on.
Users can create up to five audiences in the Delivery’s Audience Manager application.
Criteria available at this time include country, device, and cookie.
Each audience can have up to 3 out-of-the-box criteria. Criteria are joined with statements.
Users can create and deploy up to five targeted PageBuilder Editor Page experiences simultaneously. Each targeted experience includes one default page experience and up to 5 additional page variants, giving you up to 6 possible web visitor experiences.
At this time, the following functionality is not supported for Audience Targeting:
Audience Targeting is server-side and cannot be used for user-level personalization. For user-level personalization, we recommend leveraging client-side targeting and testing capabilities.
Audience Targeting is incompatible and cannot be used on websites with a server-side paywall enabled.
Audience Targeting cannot be provisioned on more than one website at this time.
Audience Targeting is not supported on PageBuilder Templates. Users can only create and deploy targeted experiences on PageBuilder Editor Pages.
For Audience Targeting, we limit the number of audiences and criteria allowed to ensure no long-term impacts on performance or scalability. Due to this, we cannot provide clients with additional capabilities beyond what is currently supported. This includes:
Clients cannot have more than 5 audiences.
Clients cannot have more than 3 criteria per audience.
Clients cannot have more than 5 targeted PageBuilder experiences activated and published simultaneously.
Clients cannot create more than 5-page variants per default page.
Clients cannot set a page variant as the default page.
Note
If you use Micro Experiences and have multiple experiences in your environment, Audience Targeting only works on the default PageBuilder experience. Secondary Micro Experiences currently does not support Audience Targeting.
Getting started with Audience Targeting
To get started with Arc XP’s Audience Targeting feature, the following prerequisites need to be completed:
Enable Delivery and PageBuilder Editor permissions for appropriate roles.
Submit a feature provisioning request.
To start with Arc XP’s Audience Targeting, contact Arc XP Customer Support, who can help begin the provisioning process.
Permissions
The following Delivery and PageBuilder Editor permissions are required to access and complete Audience Targeting tasks.
Note
Regardless of whether a PageBuilder Editor user will be completing Audience Targeting tasks, all roles working in PageBuilder Editor will need Delivery’s Access permission at a minimum to ensure there are no impacts to their PageBuilder Editor experience once Audience Targeting is provisioned.
Application | Permission | What it does? |
|---|---|---|
Delivery | Access | Minimum Delivery permission is required for all PageBuilder users to ensure the user’s PageBuilder experience is not impacted once the Audience Targeting feature is provisioned. |
Configuration Editor | Allows users to create and delete audiences in Audience Manager. | |
PageBuilder Editor | Write and/or Write and Publish | Allows a user to create/edit and/or publish default pages and page variants |
Edit Audience | Allows users to add, edit, and remove audiences for page variants. NoteThis permission also requires users to have the Delivery application's Viewer OR Content Editor privileges. | |
Manage Audience Targeting | Allows users to manage activation and deactivation events for targeted pages and page variants. NoteThis permission also requires users to have the Delivery application's Content Editor privileges. | |
Unpublish Page | Allows users to unpublish pages and page variants. | |
Delete | Allows users to delete pages and page variants |
Audience Targeting documentation and terms
Documentation
For more information on how to create audiences, curate and publish targeted experiences, and how audience targeting works, check out the following documentation:
Glossary
Term | Definition |
|---|---|
Audience | An audience is a single or combination of criteria that defines a group of site visitors users want to target based on a set of user attributes. When applied to a PageBuilder Editor page, site visitors who meet the traits defined in the audience will be served that page variant. |
Audience Criteria | An audience criteria allows users to define the traits of your user groups using built-in, out-of-the-box conditions. Supported targeting criteria include: country, cookie, and device type. |
Audience Manager | Located under the Delivery application, Audience Manager allows users to create, manage, and search for audiences. |
Audience Targeting Dashboard | Located under the Optimization tab in PageBuilder Editor, this is where users can activate and deactivate all queued pages and variants, and see currently activated targeted experiences. |
Default Page | This page is the experience that all users who do not meet the audience criteria will be served. The first page created is automatically assigned the default page. |
Optimize Workspace | New Workspace in PageBuilder Editor where users can manage the audience for your page variant and activation/deactivation tasks. |
Page Variant | This page will have the same URL as your default page, but based on the audience applied to it, it will only be served to site visitors who meet the audience criteria. |
Targeted Experience | A targeted experience combines a default page and page variants that map to a single URL. Based on a site visitor’s traits, they will be served either a default page or a page variant. |
FAQs
Below are answers to frequently asked questions. If you have additional questions, contact Arc XP Customer Support, who can help direct your question to the appropriate teams.
What is server-side targeting? What are the advantages of server-side targeting?
Server-side targeting is a form of experimentation and user optimization where the variations of the digital experience are rendered directly on the web server before it is delivered to the end user.
Can my organization be provisioned for additional capabilities (more websites, audiences, criteria per audience, page variants, targeted experiences, etc.) beyond what’s currently available?
For Audience Targeting, we are limiting the number of websites, audiences and criteria, and targeted experiences allowed to ensure no long-term impacts on performance or scalability. Due to this, we cannot provide clients with additional capabilities beyond what is currently supported.
What are some examples of ways to leverage Arc XP’s Audience Targeting?
With the out-of-the-box criteria available, there are many targeting opportunities. Some examples include:
Geo-targeting: Target users based on their location
Example: A homepage variant that targets visitors in the United States and another variant for visitors outside of the U.S. that features more international news.
Device Type Targeting: Target users based on the device from where they are visiting your website.
Example: A variant of your homepage that targets users on a mobile device and another variant for visitors visiting through a desktop or laptop.
Cookie Targeting: Target users based on whether they have a certain cookie. Using cookies as criteria, you can define any cookie key and value that you set on visitors to your websites and allow for targeting by aspects that are important to your business.
Note
Targeting with cookies will require some developer resources.
A/B Testing or Multi-Page Testing
Example: Let’s say you want to try a new layouts for your homepage. You can create audiences that segment a certain percentage of your site visitors to be served a different homepage experience. This allows you to test, validate, and iterate before committing to an implementation.
Subscribers vs. Non-Subscribers (User authentication and authorization)
Example: Let’s say you want to have video content that you would like to only be available and shown to your subscribers on your homepage. You can create an audience with cookie value for logged-in visitors to ensure only authenticated users can view this engaging/unique content.
How does my organization implement Audience Targeting?
Unlike other targeting and experimentation offerings, Arc XP’s Audience Targeting solution is integrated into the Arc XP platform and product suite, so no developer work is needed to implement the feature at the CDN or website level.
How does Arc XP’s audience targeting determine the audience for my reader?
For information about audience targeting processes, requests, and works, see: Audience Targeting: Technical Documentation.
How do we implement analytics to track the performance of our targeted experiences?
For more information about analytics and tracking, see Audience Targeting: Developer Guide.
What happens if a site visitor meets multiple audiences? Which targeted experience will they be served?
If a site visitor meets the criteria for multiple audiences for page variants with the same URL, they will be served whichever page variant was queued for activation or activated first. For more information on the page variant workflows, see: Audience Targeting: Create and Publish Targeted Experiences in PageBuilder Editor.
Can I test Audience Targeting in my local development environment?
Clients have to use Arc XP environments to test and use Audience Targeting functionality due to the requirement of the Arc XP CDN network.
How does a user’s segmentation persist across pages? I am seeing a new cookie akaas_AS_myorg_mysite_prod. Why?
This is a cookie set by Audience Targeting to persist user identification.
This cookie has long TTLs and should be preserved in the reader’s browser. It allows the Arc XP CDN network to persist users' segments that they are identified with as they browse your site in the same session or separate sessions.