Working with segment groups

You can combine segments into segment groups to further refine which visitors you want include in or exclude from your target audience.

You can use segment groups to:

• Organize segments and thus manage them more easily. For example, you can group similar segments to add them more easily in the audience settings of a modification.

• Make segments mutually exclusive within a segment group. This means that a visitor can only be in one segment within a segment group. For example, you can define segments for visitors in major cities. If a visitor is currently segmented in city A, but gets segmented again in city B, they are automatically excluded from the segment for city A.

Segment groups are site-specific.

With segment groups, you can:

• Add segments to an existing group, or a new group.

• Edit segment groups.

• Remove segment groups.

Mutually exclusive segment groups

In a mutually exclusive segment group, the platform evaluates the segments in the order in which they appear in the group. The platform places the visitor in the first segment whose segmentation rules the visitor matches, and stops there. The remaining segments in the group are not evaluated, even if the visitor would also match them. If the visitor matches none of the segments, they are not placed in any segment in the group.

Since the first match wins, the order of the segments in the group defines which segment takes precedence. Place your most specific segments at the top of the group, so that they are evaluated first, and your most general segments at the bottom, so that they only catch the visitors who did not match a more specific segment.

For example, you can create a group of three segments based on when a visitor last made a purchase on your site:

• Last purchase within 7 days

• Last purchase within 30 days

• Last purchase within 180 days

When you place the segments in a mutually exclusive segment group in this order, the first segment is evaluated first. If the visitor has made a purchase within 7 days, they are placed in the first segment, and the platform does not evaluate the other two segments. If the visitor has not made a purchase within 7 days, the platform evaluates the next segment. Again, if the visitor has not made a purchase within 30 days, the platform evaluates the last segment. If the visitor has not made a purchase within 180 days, they are not segmented at all. Visitors in the three segments probably need different kinds of content to guide them towards conversion.

The segments are in the correct order, since a visitor who has made a purchase within 7 days also matches the two broader segments. If you placed the 180-day segment first, every recent buyer would end up in that segment, and the 7-day and 30-day segments would never get any visitors.

tip

If you want a segment to catch all the visitors who did not match any of the other segments in the group, define it with the broadest rules, and place it last in the group.