Target audiences by choosing which visitors to include

An audience is a specific group of visitors who come to your site or application based on your specified conditions. For example, you may want your experiment to target visitors who have seen a specific AdWords campaign. Or, you might show an experiment to visitors on mobile devices only.

The following examples show visitors you can include or exclude:

• Visitors using certain browsers or devices.
• Visitors who come from certain sources (like an AdWords campaign, a Google search, or a Facebook ad).
• Visitors who have certain cookies.
• Visitors who come to your page with certain query parameters (like ?member=true).
• Visitors with browsers set to certain geographical areas or languages.

You can create an audience that captures that information about your visitors and add it to an experiment, so only those visitors who meet those conditions are eligible to enter. You can also use AND and OR conditions to combine multiple audiences together for more specific targeting conditions in a specific experiment.

Audiences are evaluated each time the experiment is due for activation, which means a visitor may satisfy the audience and be included in the experiment sometimes but not others. For example, the "time of day" audience condition will only qualify visitors during a time period specified.

Visitors not meeting your audience conditions are excluded from an experiment or campaign. They are excluded from your experiment and just see the usual experience on your site. They also are not included in the experiment's count of unique visitors on the Results page.

Audiences determine who can see the experiment. If you want to control where on your site the experiment will run, see URL Targeting: Choose where your experiment runs