Targeting is used to manage precisely who will be able to see, receive, or use specific items in the event. It's a powerful tool that can be applied to a variety of content types such as sessions, feeds visible in the home feed, notifications, pages, forms, and more.
To target individuals or user groups, the functionality configures a rule (or condition) that is applied to a chosen app content. This rule will query the information present in the user's profile, so that any users whose information matches the rule will be able to see/receive/use that particular app content.
Content within the app can therefore be set up so that only participants who match certain characteristics in their user profile can see or access it.
In order to target content to app users, two things are therefore needed:
- The app content that the targeting will be applied to, for example a page, menu item, session, document, notification, etc.
- User profile information, metadata fields in the user's profile in Backstage, such as the user's "Company" or "Country". More information on metadata is available in the Metadata manager article.
Common uses for targeting
Customized agendas
Customized agendas can allow each app user to have their own personalized agenda, displaying only the sessions that they are expected to attend.
This allows you to make a large agenda easier to digest for the users, who will only see the content that is relevant to them.
Customized agendas can be created by setting a user profile metadata for each session or group of sessions, and then setting up targeting on the session(s) to make it visible/accessible only to users with the matching user information.
Targeted notifications
Targeted notifications allow you to send a notification to specific users or groups of users based on their profile information.
Configure targeting on a notification by applying it to the value of a corresponding user profile metadata.
Targeted forms/surveys
Targeted forms can be delivered to users based on their profile information.
This can be useful when you want to gather feedback from a select group of users. Targeting can therefore be used to deliver forms based on session attendance, sponsor visits, or anything based on the user information.
Targeted feeds in the home feed
The home feed will display all the posts, for all the feeds, unless a particular feed is excluded from the home feed. For each of the individual feeds that are not excluded from the home feed, you can configure targeting to control who among your audience will see that particular feed's posts in the home feed.
For example, you may have a specific feed that you do not want to display in the home feed to a certain segment of your audience, or that you only want a certain segment of your audience to be able to see.
Configuring targeting
Targeting can be configured on app content such as sessions, notifications, app menu items, video breakouts, live streams, forms, pages, etc. There are four types of targeting that can be used:
- Single individual condition.
- Multiple individual conditions (meet conditions A or B).
- Multiple combined conditions (meet conditions A and B).
- Exclusion conditions.
Applying a single individual condition to a rule
- Go to the content that you wish to target in the workspace, and find the targeting fields:
- Where it says This item will be visible to app user matching any of, you can configure who will be able to see this content. Click on the Settings icon to open up the targeting menu:
- Where it says Add a condition to match, in the dropdown list, select the field from the user profile information that you would like to use for targeting (for example Country), and click on Add.
- Next, enter the user information contained in the field that you'd wish to target.
Here, we have selected Country (as the user profile field, or metadata), and we have entered France as the user information contained in that field that we will be targeting: - Click on OK to save the targeting. It will appear in Backstage as follows:
Applying multiple individual conditions to a rule (meet conditions A or B)
You can configure targeting to include multiple separate conditions in a rule. This is done by opening the rule, then clicking the + icon, and repeating the above steps to add a condition to the rule.
Here for example, we are targeting any user who is from the countries France, OR Spain, OR any user who's position is Sales representative.
Applying multiple combined conditions to a rule (meet conditions A and B)
You can also configure targeting to include multiple accumulated conditions.
This is done by adding multiple conditions together within the same targeting block. To do so, in the same rule, click on Add condition, and add the condition.
Here for example, we are targeting any user whose position is Sales, AND who is from the country France, AND who works for SpotMe.
Applying exclusion conditions to a rule
The above method can be applied in the same way to the invisibility targets.
Where it says Invisible to everyone else, select the settings icon and use the same approach here to target the users so that they will not be able to see this content.
Here for example, we have set up targeting so that it will be visible to users who are from the countries France OR Spain, OR who's position is Sales representative, however if the user's company is SpotMe, they will not be able to see this content.
Importing targeting configurations with Excel
Targeting can also be configured by importing a configuration from an Excel spreadsheet into Backstage.
How does this work?
Here, to explain how this works, we will work on the below scenario.
Users
For this example, we have a group of 9 users:
- 1 Head of product.
- 4 sales persons.
- 3 project/product managers.
The users seen in Backstage are as follows:
User metadata
We have created a metadata in the Users module that we will use to split these users into two groups. The metadata is called "Training 1", and now appears in the user's profile as a field where we can add data to.
We have added the data "sales" to the created metadata field for the user profiles of the four sales persons, and we have added the value "product" to this field for the three product persons.
We have also added the value "head" for the user who is head of product, and who will be excluded from these two sessions.
The added metadata (and the data it contains) therefore differentiates the sales people from the product people, and identifies the head of product, as seen below in the export of workspace users, in column K:
Sessions
During one afternoon, from 2 pm to 5 pm, we want to split the group into two sessions:
- One session, "Empowering your sales team" is focused on sales, and we want to invite the 4 sales people to it.
- The other session, "Product and project management" is focused on product, and we want to invite the 3 product people to it.
We also want to exclude the the Head of product from both of these sessions.
Session targeting
In this spreadsheet representing the workspace agenda exported from the sessions module, you can see on lines 7 and 8 the two sessions described above:
Here, in column E, the configuration shows:
- That the target set up for the session Empowering your sales, will make the session only visible to all users who have the data sales, in the field Training 1, in their user profile.
- That the target set up for the session Product and project management, will make the session only visible to all users who have the data product, in the field Training 1, in their user profile.
- In column F, the configuration shows that any user with the position Head of product, in their user profile, will be excluded and will not be able to see or register to these two sessions.
Adding targeting conditions to the spreadsheet
Additional target conditions can easily be set up in the spreadsheet for a given metadata field.
For example:
- To add a second condition to the Training 1 user information field, we could add a column with the header targets.1.Training_1 here to the right of column E.
- We could also add a third, or fourth condition to the same metadata, using columns with headers targets.2.Training_1, and targets.3.Training_1, etc.
- Columns can also be added for other metadata, by creating columns that include the additional metadata: for example, here to apply a condition to the "country" user information, we'd add a column with the header targets.0.Country, then targets.1.Country for an additional condition, etc.
Tips for configuring targeting using Excel
We recommend that you configure some basic targeting in Backstage manually, on the content you wish to target, before exporting the spreadsheet for the content (like above for sessions).
Once you have exported the spreadsheet you can update it following the guidelines explained above in this section.
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