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

• You need permission to manage store settings and view merchandising rules to open Customers → Audiences. Creating or changing an audience also requires permission to edit merchandising rules. 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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Default audiences

Layers adds these audiences to every store: Layers does not recreate a default audience that you delete or rename. If you already have an audience with the same name, Layers does not add a duplicate.

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Create an audience

1. Open Customers → 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. Select Create Audience to save.
6. After the next hourly refresh, review the Traffic estimate below the builder.

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 Matching searches 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 saved conditions and an approximate number of sessions per week. The audience list also shows Traffic coverage for each saved audience.

• Refreshed hourly: Layers recalculates coverage for every saved audience once an hour. The panel and the list show when coverage was last refreshed. Hover over the time to see the exact date and time.
• Saved conditions only: The estimate reflects the conditions you last saved, not unsaved edits. While you have unsaved changes, the panel says so. A new audience gets its first estimate after it is saved and the next refresh runs.
• Waiting for a refresh: After you save changed conditions, the previous estimate is cleared and the audience shows Awaiting scheduled refresh until the next hourly run. This is not the same as 0% coverage.
• 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: Coverage is a snapshot from the last refresh. A change in storefront traffic appears after the next refresh.

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. When you switch from Builder to SegmentQL, Layers generates query text only if the builder has conditions and no non-empty query already exists. If a query already exists, Layers keeps it. Select Apply to builder to validate your query and update the builder conditions. 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. Relative date bounds move with the current date rather than staying fixed to the day you saved the audience. For example, a condition for a purchase after three months ago keeps looking back three months. Relative dates are supported with after and before, not with range, list, or contains comparisons.

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Work together or with an AI assistant

Existing audiences support real-time collaboration. The name, builder conditions, and SegmentQL text share a live draft, with field locks, cursors, comments, and visible agent activity. The Editors column on the audience list shows who is working on an audience. An assistant can prepare changes and send you a review link. Review the current draft in the editor, then choose Approve & save, or reject the request. Draft edits do not change live targeting until saved. Saving an audience updates every rule that references it, so review Rules using it before approving. If an assistant changes the builder conditions without updating the query text, the editor returns to Builder rather than keeping an outdated SegmentQL query. While an assistant publishes, saving is temporarily disabled to protect the shared draft. See Managing audiences through MCP for the assistant workflow.

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Edit or delete an audience

Open Customers → 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 estimate shows Awaiting scheduled refresh: The audience is new, its conditions changed, or recent traffic could not be read yet. Your audience conditions are unaffected. Check again after the next hourly refresh, and contact Customer Care if it does not update. A pending estimate is not the same as zero matching traffic.
• The estimate did not change after an edit: Make sure you saved the audience. Unsaved edits are not estimated.
• 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.