Creating and managing Segments

A segment is a group of visitors that share characteristic traits that shouldn’t change throughout different sessions and over time. It can be a common interest in a specific product line, a purchase habit, or a specific device. 

Once created, a segment can be used as the specific targeted traffic for your campaigns (for Tests but more specifically for Personalizations). 

You'll find the Segment list in the Library section of the main navigation of the AB Tasty application.

Please refer to this article to learn how to create a segment and find the entire list of available segment criteria here. 

Creating Segments

You can create segments from the Segment page:

• From blank by clicking the Create segment button: the Segment Builder is displayed to start building a new segment from scratch. For more information about segments creation, please refer to the article How To create a Segment. 
• From templates in the Templates tab: click use on any of the available template to open the segment builder with pre-added segment and pre-configured information.

You may not have access to all segments, depending on your plan. You can still test those you can't access but you won't be able to use them for your campaigns unless you upgrade your plan.

You can also create segments directly in any campaign, in the dropdown of the Who section of the Targeting step.

Creating a segment with Segment recommendations

In case you don't know where to begin or which segment to approach via AB Tasty, we have developed a feature to provide you with relevant recommendations.
Segment recommendations is an in-house tool designed to help you get started with building personalization or test campaigns by suggesting interesting segments to activate.
You can access it by clicking the Recommendations tab:

This use case uses our AI-based content interest targeting criterion, which allows you to create segments based on the interests of your website visitors. Each week, we display the top 10 recommendations in terms of keywords. 

Managing segments

Information

The Segment page is by default on the “All” tab, which is a category for all the available and relevant segments that have not been archived or deleted. 

In the “Archived” section, you will find the list of all the segments that you manually archived from the beginning of your account activity. The archive option can be used to put aside segments (without permanently deleting them) that you know are not relevant to your short- or midterm testing or personalization strategy, but could be relevant again in the future. 

In the list, you will find the following information about each segment: 

• The segment name: Each segment needs to have a declared name when it is created. 
• Traffic share: calculation based on the past 180 days for segments including the Last Purchase and/or Purchase Frequency criteria and on the past 30 days for all other criteria.
  The percentage of total traffic is the traffic percentage which your segment represents compared to the total visitor traffic on your website within the last month. In other words, the number of visitors from the segment divided by the total number of visitors within the last month.
  
• Transaction rate: Calculation based on the past 180 days for segments including the Last Purchase and/or Purchase Frequency criteria and on the past 30 days for all other criteria.
  If the transaction tag has been placed on the website, this coincides with the segment’s transaction rate. In other words, the percentage of visitors who made a purchase out of all the visitors belonging to this segment. 
  If several transaction tags have been placed, this coincides with the overall transaction rate.
  
• Last update: The date of the last update made to that segment, which is used to rank the segment in the list.
• Status: If a segment is used inside the targeting configuration of a campaign, you will have a dedicated label that highlights the number of campaigns using the segment.

Actions

You can edit, duplicate, delete, archive or create a campaign from an existing segment from the segment list (Segment page) or from the dropdown menu of the Targeting step of your campaign. These options are accessible by hovering over the segment you want to change:  

To edit an existing segment, click the pen icon to open the Segment builder, which is the interface to configure your segment. You can then modify the name of your segment or its configuration. Click Save at the bottom right of your screen to record your changes.

If your segment is currently being used in a live campaign or is live in QA, you won’t be able to save any modifications. In this case, you’ll see a yellow disclaimer with the details of the campaigns that are using the segment and are currently live or live in QA. To make edits to this segment you should pause the ongoing campaigns or duplicate the segment to create a new one with the same configuration that you can freely edit.

• To delete an existing segment, you can click on the trash icon. A confirmation pop-in will ask you to confirm that you want to delete the selected segment. Click Delete to confirm or Cancel to return to the previous screen. 
• To duplicate an existing segment, click the duplicate icon. The selected segment will be duplicated and appear just under the selected one in your dropdown list. You can now edit the new segment and change its name and configuration.

You can’t delete a segment that is already being used in a live campaign or is live in a QA campaign.You need to pause the campaigns that use this segment to be able to delete the segment from your account.

From the segment list (Segment page), you can also:

• Archive: Click, and the segment will be moved to the Archive section of the segment page.
• Create new campaign: Hovering over this call to action, AB Tasty will allow you to choose between creating a Test or a Personalization campaign. Depending on which option you’ll choose, you will be sent through the Test or Personalization campaign creation process.

Using Segments

General usage

To use a segment that has already been configured in the "Where section" of the targeting step of any campaign, you can find it directly in the dropdown list, in the “saved segments” category:

Click any segment to select it for your campaign. Once selected, the segment setup is complete. You can then save your Targeting configuration by clicking Save on the bottom right.

Segment targeting will apply to your whole A/B Test, meaning the original variation (V0) and all subsequent variations (V1, V2, and V3 for an A/B/C/D test, for example) will be targeted to the same audience defined by your segment configuration.

For example, if you create a campaign targeting your engaged visitors only, the A/B Test will be triggered only if AB Tasty recognizes the trait “engaged”, with a random chance for visitors to see the original, V1, V2, or V3.

Single-page Experiences vs. Multipage Experiences

• For A/B Tests and Simple Personalizations you’ll have to define one single segment for your campaign as these types of campaigns have only one “experience” (one type of new content generated with AB Tasty to display).
• For Multipage Tests, Multivariate Tests, and Multipage Personalizations, you’ll have to define one segment for each “experience”. But keep in mind that the right methodology is to use exactly the same segment in each page of multipages tests, multivariate tests and multipages personalizations. 
  
• For Multi-experience Personalizations, you SHOULD use one different segment per experience. 

Use the same segment on Multipage Tests,Multipage Personalizations,and Multivariate Tests to ensure the continuity and visibility of all experiences during the visitors’ navigation. Use a different segment for every experience of your Multi-experience Personalization campaign, since the objective of this kind of campaign is to display different messages to different audience segments while preserving the rule of one visitor/one message, even for visitors who match several segments.

Always use the dropdown menu on the Targeting page to switch between experiences and set up segments for each one.

AB Tasty also offers a Replicate option that allows you to replicate the full targeting setup or one part of the targeting setup of any experience in another experience, or in all experiences. For more information, refer to this article.

Data Collection

AB Tasty starts collecting your visitor's browsing data (sessions, page views, behavior) as soon as the generic tag is integrated into your website.

Each visitor is assigned an AB Tasty cookie with a unique visitor ID when they go to your website and accept cookies. This cookie is valid for 13 months unless the visitor uses incognito browsing or clears their cookies. We store the navigation data and specific custom data generated by the tag (for instance the visitor attributes) inside the ABTasty cookie and through the tag mediation.