Manage audiences

An audience is a named group of shopper conditions you can reuse instead of rebuilding the same targeting in every rule. For example, save an audience for newsletter visitors in the United States, then use it in both collection merchandising and search ranking rules. Layers evaluates the audience’s conditions when a storefront request arrives. An audience is not a fixed customer list: a shopper can match or stop matching as their context changes. Guests can match conditions such as country or traffic source without signing in.

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Before you start

• Audiences must be enabled for your store. If Audiences is missing from Settings, contact Customer Care to check availability.
• You need permission to edit merchandising rules to manage audiences. Ask your store administrator if you cannot access the page.
• Your storefront must provide the context your conditions depend on. See contextual conditions for the available fields.

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Create an audience

1. Open Settings → Audiences and select Create Audience.
2. Click the title and enter a descriptive name, such as “US newsletter visitors”. Names must be unique within your store, regardless of capitalization.
3. In Conditions, use the Builder tab to add the shopper conditions you want to match.
4. Combine conditions with AND when all must match, or OR when any may match. Use nested groups for more detailed targeting.
5. Review the Traffic estimate below the builder.
6. Select Create Audience to save.

For the newsletter example, combine these conditions with AND: Creating an audience does not change your storefront by itself. Add it to a rule to use it for targeting.

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Reuse an audience in a rule

1. Open a rule’s contextual condition builder.
2. Choose Audience from the field picker.
3. Choose in to target matching shoppers, or not in to exclude them.
4. Search for and select one or more saved audiences.
5. Save the rule and follow its usual publishing workflow.

Selecting several audiences with in matches shoppers who meet any of those audiences. Not in matches shoppers who meet none of them. To require a shopper to match two audiences, add a separate condition for each and combine them with AND. You can combine an audience condition with other targeting conditions. For example, use your saved newsletter audience and add a date window for a promotion. In a ranking rule, choose When Conditions Match to combine an audience with query or other request conditions. Audiences are available in contextual condition builders for merchandising, search and ranking rules, sort expressions, experiments, product sequences, hidden-product rules, banners, and block rules and fallback conditions. They target shoppers, not the product attributes used to choose which products to promote or filter.

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Read the traffic estimate

The Traffic estimate panel shows the estimated share of sessions matching your conditions and an approximate number of sessions per week. The audience list also shows Traffic coverage for each saved audience.

• Recent traffic, not a forecast: Layers uses search and browse sessions with recorded context from the last seven days. This is not a count of unique customers or every visit to your store.
• Sampled coverage: The estimate checks up to the 5,000 most recent sessions, using the latest recorded context for each. It applies the matching share to the total recorded sessions in that seven-day window to estimate weekly sessions.
• Unmeasured conditions: Date and time conditions are excluded from the estimate. The panel lists conditions it cannot account for. Those conditions still apply on the storefront, so the estimate is not the exact reach of the full audience.
• Not live reporting: Recent traffic is cached briefly. A change in storefront traffic may not appear immediately.

Use the estimate to compare broad and narrow targeting, not as a guarantee of future traffic. If no sessions have been recorded in the window, zero coverage does not prove that future shoppers cannot match.

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Use SegmentQL

The SegmentQL tab is an optional text-based way to write supported audience conditions. Use Builder if you prefer to select fields and values without writing a query. Select Apply to builder to validate your query and update the builder conditions and traffic estimate. This does not save the audience. Select Create Audience or Save when you are ready. Saving from SegmentQL also validates your current query, even if you have not selected Apply to builder. If validation fails, Layers shows the errors and does not save the changes. Not every builder condition is supported in SegmentQL. If a query reports an unsupported field or condition, use Builder instead.

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Edit or delete an audience

Open Settings → Audiences and select an audience’s name, or choose Edit from its actions menu. Change its name or conditions and select Save. Rules reference the saved audience rather than a copy of its conditions. Updating an audience changes the targeting wherever it is used, including live rules. Check the Rules using it column before changing a widely used audience. Renaming an audience keeps those references intact. To delete an audience, choose Delete from its actions menu and confirm Delete Audience. Layers blocks deletion while anything still references it. The error identifies the rules or configurations you need to update first. Remove or replace those audience conditions, save the affected configurations, then try deleting again.

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Troubleshooting

• The name is already taken: Choose a different name or edit the existing audience. Changing capitalization alone does not make a name unique.
• The traffic estimate cannot load: Your audience conditions are unaffected. Try again and contact Customer Care if it keeps happening. An unavailable estimate is not the same as zero matching traffic.
• The estimate seems broader than expected: Check the unmeasured conditions listed below it, and remember that it uses recent recorded search and browse sessions rather than all store visitors.
• A query will not save: Correct the errors shown in SegmentQL, or return to Builder and save the conditions there.
• An audience cannot be deleted: Remove its references from the configurations named in the error, then retry.

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Next steps

• Contextual conditions for the shopper fields you can target.
• Create a merchandising rule to tailor collections to an audience.
• Create a ranking rule to tailor search results.
• Segmented sorting to apply sort expressions conditionally.