Define an audience with rules to target subsets of your website visitors with variations.
Audiences are subsets of your site visitors that you can explicitly target or restrict from seeing variations. For instance, you might want to show specific messaging to visitors in New York, visitors who received a specific email campaign, or visitors who recently viewed a specific page on your site.
There are two types of audiences you can create. Rules-based audiences target visitors based on criteria you choose — traits (e.g., mobile device), behavior (e.g., viewed a webpage), or integration data (e.g., Marketo: company name). Code-based audiences let you target visitors based on custom JavaScript code that you write. Learn how to create code-based audiences.
Good to know
Estimated Visitors help you validate the approximate reach of the audience by displaying how many visitors your website received in the last 30 days that match your current audience rules.
How to create a rules-based audience
To create a rules-based audience:
- Go to the Insights panel
- Click Audiences
- Click New Audience
- Enter a descriptive Audience name
- Select a rule (e.g., Device & Visitor)
- Choose the criteria (e.g., Device type)
- Choose a rule modifier (e.g., is, is not, contains, etc.)
- Choose a value (e.g., mobile phone), or enter a custom value (when allowed) and click Use [value]
- Click Add Rule to include another attribute that the visitor must also match (optional)
- Click Add Rule Set to expand your audience to also match another set of rules (optional)
- Click Save
How to edit a rules-based audience
Important
If the audience is already in use through variations, editing the audience will impact who sees those variations.
To edit a rules-based audience:
- Go to the Insights panel
- Click Audiences
- Choose an audience to modify
- Make your desired changes
- Click Save
Overview of the default rule sets
These are the standard rule sets available in all Webflow Optimize plans.
Device and visitor
Device type — this is the type of physical device the visitor is using to browse your site (e.g., mobile device, computer, etc.).
New/returning visitor — Webflow Optimize can identify when a visitor has returned to your site. You can target visitors who are browsing your site for the first time or target visitors who have browsed your site before.
Visitor bucketing — Webflow Optimize randomly assigns each visitor a number from 1-100, allowing you to target buckets of visitors. One use case for this would be to test messaging across optimizations, where you'd like the same set of visitors to see the same type of messaging as they browse your site. You can target a specific number (e.g., equals 27) or sets of numbers (e.g., greater than 50).
Note
Within visitor bucketing, the numeral assignment is sticky — returning visitors keep their originally assigned number. Each number value represents about 1% of your site’s traffic.
Location and time
Location — the general location of each visitor is automatically detected. You can target by city, country/region, DMA (i.e., Designated Market Area), or state/province.
Time — the date and time a visitor browses your website is automatically detected. You can target by time of day (e.g., Early AM), time zone (e.g., America/New York) or week part (i.e., weekday or weekend).
Source and campaign
Traffic source — where the visitor was before they clicked the link that took them to your website, based on the referrer URL.
Campaign info — the following UTM parameters are automatically detected when they're included in the referrer URL. You can leverage these UTM parameters to target marketing campaigns.
| UTM parameter |
Display name |
| utm_source |
Campaign Source |
| utm_medium |
Campaign Medium |
| utm_campaign |
Campaign Name |
| utm_term |
Campaign Term |
| utm_content |
Campaign Content |
Behavior
Webflow Optimize can detect certain actions visitors take (e.g., viewing a webpage) while viewing your website. You can target these actions to meet people where they are on their journey and deliver more personalized experiences.
For example, you can target visitors who view given webpages (e.g., a webpage about a conference) so that you can show personalized variations (e.g., conference-related messaging) on other pages.
Important
Behavioral data isn't collected until Webflow Optimize is enabled. Once enabled, up to 180 days of data are retained.
Overview of company details (enhanced match)
Note
The company details (enhanced match) rule set is included with Enterprise plans.
Enhanced match leverages reverse IP lookup to determine where a visitor might work, providing you details about that company. You can target by details such as industry, company name, domain, estimated revenue, and number of employees. That said, many factors could prevent a visitor from matching with company-level data, such as:
- The visitor's IP address may not be associated with a specific company
- The visitor could be on a public network (e.g., coffee shop) or a VPN
- If a match is made, but has a low confidence score for being accurate, Optimize won’t use the results
How enhanced match works:
- You create a variation that targets specific company details (e.g., healthcare industry workers)
- A visitor arrives on the webpage containing your variation
- Before the page loads, Optimize performs a reverse IP lookup
- If the visitor matches with company details, they're eligible for company details audiences
- The page loads with applicable variations (e.g., healthcare-themed messaging)
Overview of the integration rule sets
Note
The ability to integrate with third-party services is included with Enterprise plans.
Enterprise customers have the option to integrate with supported third-party services, enabling data to sync from that service into Webflow Optimize. A new rule set for the integrated third-party service is automatically added to the available audience rules during the integration process.
6sense and Demandbase data
6sense and Demandbase are deanonymization services, allowing you to learn more about who your visitors are. The integration combines 6sense/Demandbase data with Webflow Optimize's enhanced match data to increase the chances that a visitor can be deanonymized. If a visitor is positively matched, the webpage loads with eligible variations that target matching data.
Good to know
6sense/Demandbase data won't immediately pre-populate as available values in rules-based audiences. Once a visitor arrives on your website and matches with 6sense/Demandbase data (e.g., Industry = Healthcare), then the detected values are permanently added as available values you can choose from while building an audience. If the value you want to target is not available to choose, you can still enter the value manually.
Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo data
Salesforce, HubSpot, and Marketo are services that help you collect and manage prospects' information. You can leverage the data that you've collected to target visitors with personalized variations. You can change which data syncs to Webflow Optimize in the integration settings for each third-party service (go to the Webflow Designer > Insights panel > Integrations).
For Salesforce or HubSpot, Webflow Optimize checks if a visitor matches to Salesforce/HubSpot data before their first webpage loads on your website. If a visitor is positively matched, the webpage loads with eligible variations that target matching data.
For Marketo, Webflow relies on Marketo to identify the visitor as a known lead before Optimize can associate the visitor with Marketo data. This dependency means that the visitor will view multiple webpages before eligible variations can be loaded.