What are Website Audiences
After connecting your website to RollWorks by installing the RollWorks Pixel, RollWorks will start capturing your website traffic into Website Audiences. Website audiences are groupings of your website visitors that you define to segment and organize to understand your website visitor behavior and target them with advertising.
Visitors will be added to the Website Audiences you define as soon as the RollWorks Pixel loads. If a visitor leaves your website before the Pixel loads, the visitor will not be added to your Website Audience. The most common reasons why a visitor is not added to a Website Audience are:
- The visitor leaves before the site loads and the Pixel fires.
- The visitor leaves before they accept the cookie consent banner, so the pixel is unable to fire without consent. Learn more about Cookie Consent Banner here.
You should avoid segmenting your website traffic into too many and too small Website Audiences because it can affect the performance of your campaigns. The larger a Website Audience you are targeting is, the more RollWorks can optimize who, where, and when we target your visitors based on user intent signals.
Types of Website Audiences
The most common way to define Website Audiences to segment your website traffic is using URL-based Audiences that are based on unique URLs such as yourcompany.com/pricing or yourcompany.com/request-demo, however, you can create Website Audiences using other criteria if needed.
Click on any of the different Website Audience types below to learn what are they and how to create them:
| Website Audience Type | What is it? |
|---|---|
| URL-based Audiences |
Segment your website traffic based on the specific pages your visitors browse. Example: Visitors who visit your pricing page pricing/* |
| Pages Viewed-based Audiences |
Segment your website traffic based on a minimum number of pages they viewed while on your website. Example: Visitors who see at least 3 pages. |
| Event-based Audiences |
Segment your website traffic based on an event triggered by a visitor, such as a button click, that does not result in a change in URL. Example: Visitors that click a button to watch a demo recording. |
| Fixed Audiences |
Segment your website when your website’s URL structure does not allow for defining audiences based on specific URLs/URL patterns. Example: Pages with an IFrame element (an HTML document embedded inside another HTML document on a website). The IFrame HTML element is often used to insert content from another source into a Web page. |
| Impression-based Audiences |
Segment your audience based on a minimum number of impressions served. Example: Visitors that have been served at least 2 ad impressions. |
| Composite Audiences |
Are any combination of the above audiences. Example: Visitors who viewed your pricing page (URL-based) at least 3 times (Pages viewed-based) |
Segment your website traffic
By default, after you install the Pixel all your website traffic will be automatically added into a default audience called Visitors to Unsegmented Pages. This default audience will serve as a catch-all to track all your website traffic until you start segmenting by creating your own Website Audiences.
As you create new Website Audiences in RollWorks, your default Visitors to Unsegmented Pages will no longer include any traffic captured by your newly defined Website Audiences. Any traffic to the pages that you define separately as a Website Audience will be excluded from Visitors to Unsegmented Pages.
Now that you understand the default Website Audience called 'Visitors to Unsegmented Pages' you should start segmenting your website traffic by creating Website Audiences that capture:
- The visitors who view your High-value pages. These are important pages that denote the visitor's interest such as your pricing page (https://rollworks.com/pricing/) or product-specific landing pages (https://rollworks.com/product/identification). High-value pages are also all the landing pages in your website where you show visitors a form to submit their email address, for example, the page to request a demo (https://rollworks.com/request-a-demo/).
- The visitors who complete a Conversion. These are the pages shown to visitors after they already filled out a form and submitted their email address. For example, the 'thank you' page shown to visitors after they request a demo (https://rollworks.com/request-a-demo-ty/). We call these Conversion Audiences and they should be flagged as such when you create them.
High-value page Audiences and Conversions Audiences are not the same and should be created differently in the RollWorks platform. Before you go ahead and start building your own Website Audiences in RollWorks read this Help Center Guide to learn more about their key differences, see examples, and understand how to flag them in RollWorks.
Website Audience Duration
The Audience Duration is the amount of time that you want to keep a visitor in your defined Website Audience. Each time a new unique visitor comes to your website, your Pixel will cookie the visitor and add them to the appropriate Website Audience automatically.
The Audience Duration can be set between 1 to 120 days and can be configured differently for each of your Website Audiences. Adjusting the Audience Duration is useful if you:
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- Know that your visitors are more likely to convert within a set timeframe.
- Want to delay offering an additional incentive to convert.
- Have a campaign strategy that requires you to control the timing of when your target audience sees your ad.
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Select an audience duration between 30 and 90 days
We recommend that you use an Audience duration between 30 and 90 days and that you take the duration of your sales cycle into consideration when deciding on a duration:
- Longer durations expose the same ads to the same visitors in your audience for an extended period of time and can lead to ad fatigue. If you choose a longer duration, you should refresh your ads every four to six weeks.
- Shorter Audience Duration needs less frequent ad refreshes, as the visitors in the audience will change more frequently.
To set the Audience Duration for your Website Audiences:
- Log in to RollWorks and go to Audiences > Website Audiences.
- Click on an existing Website Audience or Create a new Audience by selecting Create Website Audience.
- Enter your desired Audience Duration (in days) under How long to keep a person in this audience.
To define an additional audience duration with the same audience rule:
- Find the audience segment and click New Duration.
- You will be taken to the audience edit page showing Adding another duration for audience_name.
- Enter your desired Audience Duration (in days) under How long to keep a person in this audience.
- Click Create Audience and you will see the same existing audience created with a new duration.
Estimated Audience Size & Unique Visitors
For all Website Audiences that you define in RollWorks, you will be able to see two different metrics Estimated Audience Size and Unique Visitors. Navigate to Audiences > Website Audiences and scroll down to Site Audiences.
Is important to understand the differences between Estimated Audience Size and Unique Visitors
- During the Website Audience creation, we selected the Audience Duration to be 90 days. We
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8,441 is the total number of unique visitors (cookies) that visited the pricing page during the last 90 days. This is the maximum number of people that could be targeted using this audience.
Unique Visitors is the number of unique people tracked during the date range selected in the Site Audiences date-picker.
For example, if you select Last 14 days as your date range
There are 1,244 unique visitors who have seen your pricing page in the last 14 days. If you adjust the date range, your Unique Visitors will change accordingly to the total count of visitors tracked during the selected period, while your current audience size will remain the same, since is based on the total number of visitors that are tracked in this audience today.
Troubleshooting
Your Website Audience is not tracking website traffic
If your audience has stopped collecting website visitors, this usually indicates that there has been a change on your website. Check with your team to confirm if there have been changes to your website site pages or code that may have caused your Pixel to stop tracking your visitors, and ensure that your RollWorks Pixel is active on every page of your website.
For example, if the structure of your website URL is changing, or if the URL in a specific landing page has changed, you will need to update the Website Audience criteria so that we can continue to track visitors under the right audiences.
Your Website Audience size is smaller than expected
Ensure that your RollWorks Pixel is active and fires on every page of your website. Your RollWorks Pixel can only detect activity on a page if it is active on that page. Learn more about how to troubleshoot your Pixel in this article.
If your Pixel is active and is firing on every page of your website, the issue could be likely due to page load time. We recommend that you activate your RollWorks Pixel in your global header, your pixel doesn't fire until your header loads. If your page contains a lot of multimedia elements such as sounds, images, or videos, it's possible that your website is not loading fast enough for your RollWorks Pixel to finish firing before your visitor navigates away.
If you have a Cookie Consent Banner
Keep in mind that visitors will be added to the Website Audiences only after the Pixel fires. If a visitor leaves your website before the Pixel loads, the visitor will not be added to your Website Audience.
If your visitor leaves your website before they accept the Cookie consent banner, the Pixel will not fire and they will not be added to your Website Audiences.