Any difference Audience only VS Audience + Refinements?

[richardlee]

Hi hoping some can clarify what the difference is.

I other posts  Re: When should I be using Audiences vs. Refinements?  I have seen people describe Audience as where you define who can enter the campaign  and Refinement to define the page scope. However, within Audience can also define page scope as well.

Is this hangover from a legacy version of Target? i.e. has the page scoping rules been now merged into Audiences so refinement is redundant?

[Shruthi_N]

Hi @richardlee ,

As mentioned in  Form-Based Experience Composer ,  Refinements have been replaced with full audience functionality. Refinements for existing activities have been migrated to activity-only audiences.

So yes you are correct, there is no need to have both audience refinements as well as a targeting audience . If you choose to do so you could skip the refinements and just have the targeting audience .

Using refinements gives you more control to determine the scope of where the activity is delivered .

Eg. If you want to have a form based activity off the global mbox but want to display it only on the support page  you can have the audience refinement as where  url contains /support/ and then have the audience to enter the activity as say Browser = Chrome .

If you do not have the audience refinement in place and have only the targeting audience as url contains /support/ + Browser = chrome , then the activity will be running on all the pages where the global mbox is firing and each user will be evaluated against the audience entry conditions . Where as if you have the audience refinement in place the visitors will only be evaluated for it on the support page.

Hope that provides more context.

[richardlee]

Hi Shruthi thanks for the reply still a bit lost.

You say refinements have been replaced with full audience functionality but i still see 'Audience Refinement' within each experience under location selection - is this that just for legacy?

Also regarding using targeting audience browser = Chrome AND audience refinement page = /support wouldnt this lead to more collisions? As your bucketing ALL Chrome visitors into the activity even though the experience will only be triggered on the /support page?

Ultimately my goal is to reduce collisions where for example one test may be aimed at improving landing page conversion to the funnel E.g. landing page to quote start. Another might be improving conversion with the funnel itself quote start to quote complete.

[Shruthi_N · Accepted solution]

Hi Richard , When you click on audience refinement you can see that it opens up the Audience creation UI which is the same as what you would see in the Targeting Step. This ensures consistency and gives you ability to use audiences from the audience library . So as I mentioned earlier its optional if you would like to use the audience refinements or not.

Some users who might be more comfortable with the legacy way might choose to use audience refinements for their specific use cases or use a combination .

W.r.t to collisions if there is only one activity running on the support page , there won't be any collisions . But if you do have multiple activities running on that page, users might qualify for more than one test if they meet the targeting conditions .

More information on collisions and activity priorities  can be found  at Priority with examples. Hope this helps.

[gpolkin1]

Sorry to revive an old thread but I have the same question as the original poster and don't feel like the response on this thread was clear.  

Given both the 'audience' and 'audience refinements'  get applied, what difference does it make if I put criteria in which area of the UI? 

For example, if I am running a global mbox and I want the test to run where:

• Landing Page URL Contains '/membership' AND current page URL contains '/product' 

Does it matter where I embed this logic?  In the 'audience'? In the 'audience refinements'?  One criteria in one and one in another?  

Is there an order of operations being applied?  Is speed of execution a factor?

Fairly confused at this point.