The v1.26.0 release of Newspack Campaigns contains several significant changes, both in the way admin users create and manage campaigns and prompts, and how readers see them. We recommend you review your site’s prompts and segments to ensure that they’re still displayed to their intended audience segments going forward.
This page summarizes the most important aspects of these changes and how they affect what your readers might see when they visit your site. For a more detailed list of changes included in each release, refer to the GitHub repository.
Non-Cascading Segment Matching
When it comes to determining which audience segments a reader matches, v1.25.0 and prior releases used what we call cascading segment matching. This meant:
- If a reader matches more than one audience segment, Newspack Campaigns displayed prompts that belong to all matching segments.
- If an overlay or above-header prompt is displayed, then conflicting overlays or above-headers belonging to lower-priority segments were not displayed.
- Prompts with no assigned segment were displayed for all readers, unless they conflict with an overlay or above-header in a matching segment.
Going forward, with non-cascading segment matching in v1.26.0 and future releases, this means:
- If a reader matches more than one audience segment, Newspack Campaigns will display only prompts belonging to the highest-priority matching segment.
- Prompts belonging to lower-priority matching segments will no longer be displayed.
- Prompts with no assigned segment (now called the Everyone segment in the Newspack Campaigns wizard) will still be displayed to all readers, unless they conflict with an overlay or above-header prompt in the highest-priority matching segment.
- If the reader’s highest-priority matching segment does not contain any prompts, then the reader will only see prompts assigned to the Everyone segment.
- This also makes previewing segments a bit easier to understand. Now, when previewing as a segment, only prompts belonging to the previewed segments are shown, plus any belonging to “Everyone.” You will no longer see prompts assigned to a different segment when previewing a specific segment, which often happens with cascading segment matching.
An Example
Consider a site with the following segments in the following order of priority:
- Donors
- Active Readers (5+ articles read in session)
- Everyone (this is the default for all sites, locked to the lowest priority)
It should be possible to create a prompt (e.g. a donation CTA) assigned to Active Readers that will never be shown to Donors, even if many donors will match both segments.
Previously, with cascading segment matching (v1.25.0 and prior releases), a prompt assigned to Active Readers will also be shown to any Donors who have read 5+ articles in a session. All readers will see any prompts assigned to Everyone.
Going forward, with non-cascading segment matching (v1.26.0 and future releases), any readers who match the Donors segment will only see prompts assigned to the Donors segment, even if they match both segments. All readers will still see prompts assigned to Everyone.
Multiple Segments per Prompt
Previously, in v1.25.0 and prior releases, only one segment could be assigned to any one prompt. This meant that if you wanted to display the same prompt to readers in two non-overlapping segments, you would have to duplicate the prompt and assign each copy to each segment.
Going forward, in v1.26.0 and future releases, prompts can be assigned as many segments as you like, so you should no longer have to duplicate any prompts to ensure they’re shown to various audience segments. A prompt is shown to readers as long as their highest-priority matching segment is one of the segments assigned to the prompt, or the prompt is assigned to the “Everyone” segment.
Preview Sessions
With v1.26.0, prompts in preview sessions now behave as they would for front-end readers.
This means that when previewing prompts and navigating throughout the site in the preview window, prompts will “remember” actions you take as a reader in that preview session. For example, if you dismiss a prompt, it will no longer be displayed on subsequent page loads in that preview session. Prompts with the “once” and “once a day” frequency settings will only be shown once in each preview session. The preview session ends once you close out of the preview window or refresh the page.
