Visitor groups

  • Updated

This topic is intended for administrators and developers with administration access rights in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS).

Personalization in CMS lets you target website content to selected visitor groups. The personalization feature is based on customized visitor groups that you create based on a set of personalization criteria. CMS provides a set of basic criteria such as geographic location, number of visits, and referring search phrase. You can also develop customized criteria.

See Working with visitor groups for personalization and segments for different user scenarios when working with visitor groups.

Built-in visitor group criteria

CMS comes with the following built-in visitor group criteria.

Technical criteria

  • Display Channel – Matches the visitor’s current display channel when visiting the website, that is, it distinguishes between web and mobile visitors. From the Technical Criteria category, add the Display Channel criterion, and select Mobile or Web channel.

    Image: Display Channel visitor group criteria

  • IP Range – Matches an exact IP address or an IP range that is equal to or above, or equal to and below a defined IP number, used by the visitor when visiting the website.
    • Equal to – To match with an exact IP address, select the equal sign (=) and enter the exact IP address.

      Image: Equal to exact IP address

    • Equal to or above (>=) – If you use the 'greater than or equal to' sign (>=), the visitor's IP address and the specified IP address are both converted into integers and compared. If the integer from the visitor's IP address is the same as or higher than the integer of the specified address, the visitor group criteria is considered met and the visitor is part of the visitor group.

    • Equal to or below (<=) – If you use the 'less than or equal to' sign (<=), the visitor's IP address and the specified IP address are both converted into integers and compared. If the integer from the visitor's IP address is the same as or lower than the integer of the specified address, the visitor group criteria is considered met and the visitor is part of the visitor group.

  • Role – Matches the visitor's access role when visiting the website. You can include roles by using the In Role condition and exclude roles by using the Not in role condition.

    Image: Role visitor group

 URL criteria

  • Download File – Matches a specific file which is considered already been viewed or loaded by browsers. The file path can be the file name only or a relative path to a file. If the path to a loaded image contains the configured path, the visitor group criterion is considered met. You can use this criterion to, for example, check if the image CompanyLogo.png has been viewed by entering the path to the image.

    Image: Download file visitor group

  • Query string – Matches the request to see if it contains a query string key with the specified value. Conditions can be:
    • Exist – Checks only if the key exists in query string.
    • Has Value – Checks both the key and the value represented in URL’s query string.

      When the Exist condition is selected, the Value text box is disabled.

      Image: Query string visitor group

  • Referrer – Matches the Host name or URL of the referred page that was clicked before entering the site, such as a search engine result page. You can decide if the referrer criteria matches on equal, contain, start with, or end with a specified value for the whole or parts of the Host name or URL. See Example: Referrer.
  • Search Keyword – Stores the URL of the referred page that was clicked before entering the site, such as the URL of a search engine result page. Your partner developer can define this criteria to specify the search word to match against the URL by a regular expression. The regular expression finds search words in the URL.

    This criterion is not compatible with Google due to privacy restrictions for Google searches.

  • Landing URL – Matches the URL with which the visitor enters the site. You can decide if the landing URL is equal, starts with, or ends with the with a specified value. For example, contains www.example to match www.example.com, www.exampleURL.com and so on.

Time and place criteria

  • Event – Matches a set time period.

    For example, you can configure this visitor group criterion for sale events which occurs the first day of every month by selecting the Every Month recurrence.

    Image: Event visitor group

      • Recurrence can be:
        • Every Month – Occurs at a specific day in every month, with start from the set Start Time.
        • Every Year – Occurs once a year at a specific day, with start from the set Start Time.
        • Never – Not in the time period specified between Start Time and End Time.
        • If Every Month or Every Year recurrence type is selected, End Time is disabled.

    For example, you can configure this visitor group criterion for sale events which occurs the first day of every month by selecting the Every Month recurrence.

    Image: Event visitor group

  • Time On Site – Matches the total length of time of a user’s visit since the session start. If the total length of time is greater than or equal to the configured time, then the visitor group criterion is considered met.
    • Duration Unit – The duration time can be Seconds, Minutes or Hours.
    • Time On Site – The value range is from 0 to 60.

    Image: Time On Site visitor group

  • Time Period – Matches the time and date of the visit. If it is within the specified time period, the visitor group criterion is considered met. From the Time and Place Criteria category, drag and drop the Time Period criterion.

    Image: Time Period visitor group

  • Geographic Coordinate – Uses the visitor’s approximate location in a geolocation database (based on visitor IP address). Drag the marker to the map (Google maps), and select a radius around that point to indicate the visitor's proximity to the location. See Example: Geographic coordinate.

  • Geographic Location – Matches the visitor to a specific continent, country, and region. For example, Continent: Europe, Country: Norway, Region: Oslo. You can also specify a wildcard for country and region. For example, Country N* in Europe yields Netherlands and Norway. See Example: Geographic location.

  • Time of Day – Matches the visitor's time period with the start time, end time (15-minute intervals), and days you specify. For example, From 2:00 PM to 4:15 PM on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday.

For information on how Geographic coordinate and Geographic location are manually enabled, see Enabling a Geolocation provider in Configuring personalization on Optimizely World.

Site criteria

  • Selected Language – Checks which language the visitor is viewing a page in when using fallbacks. For example, check if the visitor views a page in English by selecting the In condition, or not in Svenska language by selecting the Is Not condition. Languages which are defined and enabled are available in the list.

    Image: Selected language visitor group

  • Number of Visits – Matches the number of times the visitor has visited the website. You can specify Less than, Equal, or More than, within a number of days (weeks, months or years), or since a date, or in total. For example, Less than 1 [visit] within 10 days.

  • Visited Category – Select one of the website's page categories. You can also select a number of pages that use the category and were visited. The visitor must have visited the specified number of pages to which the category is applied. For example, Category X viewed at least 3 pages out of a total of 6.

  • Visited Page – Select a site page. If the visitor have visited that page during the current session, the criteria is considered met.

Visitor groups criteria

Visitor Group Membership – Select members from existing visitor groups. For example, Member of Job Applicants, or Not a Member of Start Customer Club.

Optimizely forms criteria

Optimizely Forms is an add-on and must be installed separately.
  • Submitted Form – Matches when a visitor submits (or does not submit) a particular form that you select from a drop-down list. For example, Has Submitted Job Application. See Example: Form and form values.
  • Submitted Form Value – Matches when a visitor submit a particular form value. See Example: Form and form values.

The Optimizely Forms Samples package must be installed for the forms visitor group criteria to work. See Optimizely Forms Samples package for information.

Manage visitor groups

Visitor groups are managed from the Visitor Group option in the top menu. When creating a new visitor group, you select one or more criteria and define appropriate settings. Those criteria are used to determine whether a user visiting the website is a part of that visitor group.

You can make the editor a member of VisitorGroupAdmins. This group provides access only to the Visitor Groups option in the top menu.

From CMS 12, this user interface has changed noticeably.

CMS 12 and later

Image: Visitor groups UI in CMS 12

CMS 11 and earlier

To see documentation for CMS 11 and lower, see an older version of this user guide, for example version 21-2.

Image: Visitor groups UI in CMS 11

Create a visitor group

  1. From the top menu, select CMS > Visitor Groups.
  2. Click Create Visitor Group. The Create Visitor Group view appears.
  3. Give the visitor group a unique name to separate it from other visitor groups.
  4. In Name, name the visitor group you are creating. This name appears in the personalized content box when you select the content on a page.
  5. In Notes, type a descriptive text about the visitor group you have created, for example, its purpose. This description appears as a tooltip when the editor is adding a visitor group to the content on a page.
  6. Select the Make this visitor group available when setting access rights for pages and files check box if you want this visitor group to be available when setting access rights for pages and files in admin view.
    Visitor groups only have read access.
  7. Click Add criteria to see a drop-down menu with available criteria.
  8. From the drop-down menu, select a criteria and adjust its settings as necessary. Add more than one criteria if needed. See examples described in Examples of creating visitor groups.
  9. In the Match drop-down list, select one of the following.
    • All – Select this if you want all criteria to be met for a visitor to be included in the visitor group.
    • Any – Select this if it is enough that only one of the criteria is met for a visitor to be included in the visitor group.
    • Points – Use points if you want to set that some criteria are more important that others.
  10. Click Save Visitor Group.

Edit a visitor group

  1. Select Visitor Groups from the top menu.
  2. Click the name of the visitor group you want to change.
  3. Add a new criterion for the visitor group, change the value for an existing criterion, or click Optimizely image to delete an existing criterion.

  4. Click Save Visitor Group.

If you change the name of a visitor group available in the list for access rights, the settings for this visitor group no longer work.

Copy a visitor group

  1. Select Visitor Groups from the top menu.
  2. Click the context menu on the visitor group you want to copy and click Duplicate.
    Image: Copy visitor group from context menu
  3. Confirm the copy action. The new copy has the same name as the original but with the extension - Copy.
  4. Rename and change criteria for the new visitor group you have copied.

Delete a visitor group

  1. From the top menu, select CMS > Visitor Groups.
  2. Click the context menu on the visitor group you want to delete and click Delete.
    Image: Delete visitor group from context menu
  3. Confirm the deletion.

Using a visitor group to personalize content

When you have created a visitor group, you can use it to personalize content, target a discount, create Optimizely Visitor Intelligence segments and so on. See Using visitor groups in the Personalization section.

Examples of creating visitor groups

Site criteria and points

By using Points, you can set a value for how much an action is worth, for example, a visited campaign page. In this example, a visitor who visits the page on a certain date matches the visitor group criteria.

Image: Edit visitor group screen

  1. In the Match drop-down list, select the criteria to match Point.
  2. Drag and drop the Visited Page criterion, and select page. Drag and drop the criteria again to add several pages.
  3. Drag and drop the Number of Visits criterion, and select More than > 1 > Since [date]. (To create a visitor group for visitors who have never visited the page, select Less than > 1 > Since [date].)

    Image: Number of Visits crition

  4. Enter the number of points each criterion is worth, and select whether or not the criterion is required.
  5. Select Threshold for the criteria you added in your visitor group. For example, the visitor must fulfill 1 of 3 criteria to be included in the visitor group.
  6. Click Save.

Geographic location

You can direct content to visitors from a specific country and specific days. For example, people from Sweden visiting your website on weekdays. You can show these visitors a clickable banner to sign up for a conference.

  1. Drag and drop the Geographic Location criteria, and select Continent, Country and/or Region. Use drag and drop of the criteria again to add several countries.

    Image: Geographic Location crition

  2. Drag and drop the Time of Day criteria, and select [weekday]. You can also select the personalization to start and end at a specific time.
  3. Click Save.

Geographic coordinate

You can direct your content to visitors from a specific part of a city, for example, People from Upplandsgatan, Stockholm.

  1. Drag and drop the Geographic Coordinate criteria, and click Select Location.
  2. Click Select location to display a map that you click to set a location. You can zoom in the map for more precise locations.
  3. Select the Radius [number of kilometers or miles].

    Image: Geographic Coordinate crition

  4. Click Save.

Referrer

The HTTP Referrer is based on pages, such as those used in a campaign. For example, you can target content to visitors who

  • search for optimizely and cms on Google.com
  • from the search result page, click the Optimizely landing page link
  1. Drag and drop the Referrer criteria, and select URL > Equals > the URL of the search engine result page, for example, https://www.google.se/#hl=sv&source=hp&biw=1338&bih=790&q=optimizely+cms.

    Image: Referrer crition

  2. You can also add the Geographic Location to select a country.
  3. Click Save.

Form and form values

Optimizely Forms and the Optimizely Forms Samples package must be installed for the forms visitor group criteria to work.

You can base a visitor group on whether the visitor has (or has not) submitted a particular form or form value. For example, you can target content to visitors who submit a Job Application form:

Image: Submitted form crition

You can target content to visitors that give you a low rating on a Satisfaction Survey.

Image: Submitted form value crition

Additional visitor group criteria

You can extend the built-in visitor group criteria as follows:

Optimizely Customized Commerce criteria

Visitor group criteria specific for e-commerce, such as customer properties, markets, and order frequency criteria. See Personalization for Optimizely Customized Commerce.

Optimizely Marketing Automation

Visitor group criteria specifically designed for marketing automation.