Understand How Segmentation Works

Audience vs. Segmentation

Every experiment has two separate layers of targeting:

• Audience - which pages the experiment runs on.

• Segmentation - which visitors see it, once they're on one of those pages.

This article covers both, since they're often confused with each other, but they're configured and behave differently.

Audience - choosing your pages

In the Audience tab, you insert the URLs of the pages where you want your experiment to run, using one of these conditions:

• URL is - runs only on the exact page entered.

• URL is not - runs on every page except the one entered.

• URL starts with - runs on any page whose URL starts with the entered value.

• URL ends with - runs on any page whose URL ends with the entered value.

• URL contains - runs on any page whose URL contains the entered value.

• URL does not contain - runs on any page whose URL does not contain the entered value.

• URL RegEx - define matching pages using a regular expression.

• Page contains keyword - runs on pages containing a specific keyword or short phrase.

Common Audience mistakes

Case 1 - Trailing slash from copy-paste

Copying a URL directly from your browser and pasting it into URL is often adds a trailing / at the end. Always double-check that the URL in the Audience tab matches the browser URL exactly.

Case 2 - Missing or extra "www"

If you type a URL manually and get the www wrong, URL is will consider it invalid and the experiment won't apply.

Case 3 - HTTP to HTTPS migration

If you enable SSL after already creating an experiment with http:// in its Audience settings, that experiment stops applying once your URLs switch to https://. Edit the experiment to replace http with https, and update your website's URL under Edit website in the Dashboard too, to prevent this happening again on future experiments.

Case 4 - UTM parameters excluded by "URL is" (the most common mistake)

If your Audience is set using only URL is, any visitor arriving with extra parameters in the URL - ?utm_source=..., ?gclid=..., or any other query string - won't match, since URL is requires an exact match. This silently excludes a large share of your paid and campaign traffic, often without any obvious symptom.

Solution - the template we recommend: set up four URL conditions together, combined with OR, to cover both the trailing-slash and no-trailing-slash versions of your URL, with and without query parameters:

1. URL is → https://www.example.com

2. URL starts with → https://www.example.com?

3. URL is → https://www.example.com/

4. URL starts with → https://www.example.com/?

This will apply the experiment only for this specific page, but will include traffic with extra parameters as well.

Case 5 - Redirect URL included in a Split URL Test's own Audience

If you're running a Split URL Test and accidentally include the redirect destination URL in that same experiment's Audience settings, you create a loop - the experiment keeps redirecting the visitor to a page that then matches the Audience again, showing them a blank/white page.

Solution: add the redirect destination URL to Excluded URL pages instead, using URL starts with or URL contains, so the experiment can never accidentally trigger on the page it redirects to.

Reusing an Audience with page grouping

If you regularly create experiments on the same set of pages, save that setup once instead of rebuilding it every time.

1. While editing an experiment's Audience, after entering all the URLs, press Save page grouping.

2. Name the page group and press Save.

3. In any future experiment, press Select page grouping to load a saved group instead of manually re-entering the rules.

4. From the same dropdown, you can Rename or Delete saved groupings.
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Segmentation - choosing your visitors

Once your Audience defines which pages the experiment can appear on, Segmentation controls which visitors on those pages actually see it. Any experiment - A/B test, Personalization, Overlay, or Survey - needs a segment.

Creating a segment

1. From the left menu, select Advanced, then Segments.

2. Press Create new segment.
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3. Name your segment according to your marketing goal or target audience, and optionally add a description.

   Note

   If you manage multiple websites on your account, you can also choose to make a segment available only to specific websites rather than all of them.

4. For each condition, choose Include or Exclude first, then pick the parameter and value.

Combining conditions with OR and AND

Once you have more than one condition, combine them using the OR and AND operators.

OR - at least one condition must be true

Example: Include New visitor OR Include Country is France. A visitor only needs to match one of the two.

AND - both conditions must be true

Example: Include Country is Romania AND Exclude Returning visitor. Both conditions must hold.

This applies specifically when using Exclude conditions: if you want to exclude visitors matching multiple conditions, connect those conditions with AND, not OR. If you use OR between multiple Exclude conditions, only the first condition is actually applied - the rest are ignored.

Example: you want to exclude visitors from Germany or from France. Set this up as:

• Exclude → Country → Is → Germany AND

• Exclude → Country → Is → France

Using OR here instead of AND would mean only the Germany condition actually excludes anyone.

Available conditions

Explore supports a wide range of segmentation parameters - traffic source, geolocation, conversion history, device type, cookies, custom JavaScript, and more.

See Segmentation Conditions Reference for the full list with examples for each.