Guidance and tips for building effective targeted audiences.
Audience segmentation is one of Feathr's most powerful features. Using Groups enables you to create distinct and nuanced collections of your total web audience with certain common activities and attributes that are relevant to your marketing messages. This article teaches segmentation methods and best practices by discussing how to use Feathr's filtering capabilities to build some useful Groups types. This article assumes you're familiar with the steps of building a Group, but if not, read this article first.
Note: to learn about registration confirmation Groups, click here. They are important enough to deserve their own article.
Page Visit Groups
In this section, we'll discuss the creation of a few Group types that will be useful for nearly every Feathr user. They are all based on browsing activity. The first, and simplest, is a "full site" Group. This builds an audience capable of targeting everyone who has visited your website, and whose cookie has been retained, since placing the Feathr Super Pixel.
Begin by navigating to Community and customizing the filters. Keep it looking at data from any time. Next, click + Add Filter Set. The default filter variable is URL Visited. You will keep that, but change is to starts with.
Starts with is a useful variable because it will include data from any web address you enter, as well as any pages that begin with the same URL. For example, if I add URL starts with https://www.feathr.co/ , the filter will also capture data from:
And so on. It will also include any sub-sub pages, such as:
As long as your website's URLs share a common starting address, the starts with variable will capture whatever is beyond.
To continue, enter your website's home URL.
Once you've completed those steps, click Save as Group and give it a name. In addition to having valuable analytics about your full web audience, you'll now be able to target this audience in retargeting campaigns.
If you've placed your Super Pixel on more than one website, we recommend creating a full site Group for each.
Marketing Prospects
This type of Group works the same as a full site Group, but captures data from pages with a specific marketing purpose. We'll use attendee prospects as our first example.
Begin by following the same steps as above, but enter the URL of the page on your website that best promotes event attendance. We frequently see those pages end with something like:
- /attendees
- /why-attend
- /annual-conference
If your website contains sub-pages beyond the initial attendee-facing page, such as
- /attendees/schedule/
- /why-attend/speakers/meryl-streep
- /annual-conference/about/tracks/youngprofessionals
then you can use the starts with variable again. If not, follow the directions in this article to combine more than one filter in a single Group.
Follow these same steps for any page or group that deserves its own distinct marketing campaign. You might have prospective sponsor- or exhibitor-facing pages that would make valuable seed audiences for targeted Groups. Any page on your website has the potential to be the basis for a useful segmented audience. The way you organize them is up to you.
Campaign Interaction Groups
In digital advertising, it's well known that the more times you can get in front of marketing prospects' eyes, the better chance you'll have to convert them. One of the best ways to stay in front of new prospects is to follow up any audience expansion campaigns (such as Search Keyword, Email Mapping, or Geofencing campaigns) with a retargeting campaign targeting the people who interacted with those initial campaigns. (Read more about campaign types here.)
To do that, you must first build targetable Groups that contain data from those people. Here's how.
Campaign Filters
Once you've run any audience expansion campaigns, some of the new audience members you've reached will be targetable.
The date range of this Group will be up to you; you can keep the default of looking at data from any time, or you can specify a more targeted date range based on the dates of your campaigns.
Click + Add Filter Set. This time, instead of choosing URL Visited, choose Campaign. This tells Feathr that you'd like to filter by users who have interacted in some way with your previous campaigns.
The default variable that displays next is "exists." You could stop here and you would be building a Group of anyone whose cookie you've captured that has either seen or clicked on any ad on any campaign you've run. This would be the broadest possible Group of campaign interactions.
To build a Group of people who have interacted with a specific campaign, change exists to is, and then choose the campaign you'd like to target in the next field. This will limit the Group audience to only people whose cookie you've captured that have either seen or clicked on any ad in that campaign. You can stack similar filters to combine specific campaigns into a single Group.
To further filter by only the people who clicked on an ad in that campaign, use the variable called Activity Type. This can distinguish between the type of interaction your prospects had with your campaign. This example also adds a rule to the Group to ensure that everyone in this Group not only saw that specific campaign, but also clicked on it. Begin by clicking the + sign to the right of the existing Filter Set:
Then, create another Filter set such as the one below using Activity Type is.
Attribute Groups
Feathr's filter variables also contain a category called Person Attributes. Using Attribute filters allows you to filter by date, time, and usage-based variables, as well as certain identifying demographic data such as name and email (if known).
One useful attribute-based Group is what we call a Super Users Group. These are the people engaging most with your website and its content, and can be filtered by the number of times they've been seen on your site. To discover their data and save them as a targeted audience, you will use the Times Seen variable. Begin as usual, by choosing your date range and clicking + Add Filter Set. Now select Times Seen. This variable filters by the number of times people have visited your website.
Deciding how many visits constitutes a Super User for your website is up to you. For our purposes here, we'll choose 10. The nice part about the Times Seen variable is that it allows you to choose additional variables, such as greater than and less than.
You can save this Group as-is, and you will have a targetable audience of your biggest fans.
Consider filtering out your own staff's IP addresses before running a campaign to your Super User Group, as your staff will certainly have visited your own website more than anyone else. This can be done in your Feathr account settings.
In addition to a number of date- and time-based variables in the Person Attributes category, you will see variables representing personally identifiable information. There are two ways to populate data in those variables: manually adding name, email, etc. to people records, or connecting Custom Data to your website to capture form fills from people who volunteer that information.
Now that you know some of the best practices and tips for setting up successful Groups, think creatively about how you can combine filters and Groups to get your marketing message in front of the best audience for you.
Includes & Excludes
You can also build filter sets and decide whether your Group will include the people described or exclude them. Combining Includes and Excludes filter sets can help you narrow your Group to the perfect audience for your campaigns. Below is an example of two filters being used to narrow an audience down to people who received an email but did not open an email within the last 14 days:
Understanding Filter Sets vs. Breadcrumb Conditions
When you click Add Filter Set, you're adding a brand new, independent condition to your Group. For example, you might create one filter set for URL activity and a separate filter set for an Attribute like Times Seen. The small "+" button found inside a filter set works differently. It adds an additional AND condition that only applies within that same filter set's parent Breadcrumb.
This distinction matters because of how Feathr evaluates Activities. Every visit, form fill, or ad click a person generates is recorded as its own individual Activity, often referred to as a Breadcrumb. When you use the "+" to stack conditions onto a single filter set, you're telling Feathr that all of those conditions must be true on that same Breadcrumb. When you use Add Filter Set instead, you're asking Feathr to evaluate each condition independently. These conditions can be satisfied by entirely different Breadcrumbs, and even on different days.
As a general rule, use the "+" within a filter set when your conditions describe a single activity. For example, a form submission where the Form Name equals Newsletter Signup would need both conditions to be true on that same event. Use Add Filter Set when you're combining separate behaviors instead, such as someone who visited your pricing page and also opened an email. These behaviors don't need to happen in the same moment, and they don't even need to be the same type of activity.
Manual Filters vs. the Pixl Group Builder
There are two paths you can take to build the same Group. Manual filter building, covered above and in How to Build a Group, gives you complete control over every filter set you create. The Pixl Group Builder takes a different approach, allowing you to describe your audience in plain language while Feathr Intelligence constructs the filter sets on your behalf. This can be a great starting point for more complex Groups, though the filter sets it generates should always be reviewed before use. See Pixl Group Builder Best Practices for guidance on writing effective prompts, including how to describe exclusions clearly.
Most customers find that a mix of both approaches works best, using the Pixl Group Builder to get a fast first draft, then refining that draft with manual filters.
Quick Glossary
Filter Operators
Exists
Matches records that have any value populated in the selected field, regardless of what that value is. This is often used to build broad Groups, since it simply confirms the field is present on the record.
Does Not Exist
Matches records where the selected field has no value populated at all.
Is
Matches records where the value is an exact match to what you've entered. For example, Form Name is Newsletter Signup will only return activity from that specific form.
Is Not
Matches records where the value does not exactly match what you've entered, excluding an exact match while allowing everything else through.
Starts With
Matches records where the value begins with the text you've entered. This is commonly used for URL filtering, since it captures a page along with every sub-page beneath it.
Matches Pattern
Uses the asterisk symbol (*) as a wildcard. For example, in a URL filter, Matches Pattern will match any person who has visited a URL where everything outside the wildcarded portion matches exactly, while the wildcarded portion itself can be anything.
Matches the Expression
A more powerful version of Matches Pattern that allows you to match complex textual patterns within the filtered text. This gives you far more flexibility than a simple wildcard, since it lets you define detailed rules about the structure of the text you're matching against. This is an advanced operator.
Contains
Matches records where the value includes the text you've entered anywhere within it, rather than requiring an exact match.