Rarely will you want a prompt to be shown to every reader who visits your site—more likely, you’ll want to target specific groups of readers based on their interactions with your site. Audience segments allow you to target readers by engagement, activity, and more.

A good rule of thumb for segments is to set just a couple of criteria; any more than that and you risk over-segmenting your readers. You want to make sure you’re actually targeting a reasonable set of behaviors in the parameters you set.

Segments are in priority order, from top to bottom. It behaves like a series of if-else statements: if in segment 1, show these prompts, if not, try segment 2, etc.

Creating an audience segment

To create an audience segment, follow these steps:

  1. Navigate to Dashboard > Newspack > Campaigns and click on the Segments tab.
  1. Click Add New Segment to create a new audience segment. Give it a descriptive name, and fill out the criteria you’d like to apply to it (more on segmentation criteria at the bottom of this page).
  1. Click Save.

Once you’ve created at least one audience segment, you will be able to see them all listed under the Segments tab, and will be able to edit them from there:

Segment priority

The list of segments is shown in descending order of priority, with the highest priority at the top. Reorder the list by clicking and dragging the grabber icon or by clicking the up or down arrows in each segment.

Segment priority determines which prompts are seen by readers who match more than one segment, or in the event of a conflict.

  • Multiple segments: Readers who match more than one segment will only see prompts that are assigned to the segment with the highest priority, plus any prompts assigned to “Everyone.” If the matching segment with the highest priority does not have any assigned prompts, then the reader will see only prompts assigned to “Everyone.”
  • Conflicts: Only one overlay prompt and one above-header prompt can be displayed at any one time. If a reader matches multiple segments, all of which have overlay or above-header prompts, the prompts from the highest-priority segment will be shown.

Assigning prompts to an audience segment

Once you’ve created one or more segments, you can assign prompts to them. The prompts will only be shown to visitors who match the segment. There are two ways to assign a prompt to a segment:

The first and easiest way is from Dashboard > Newspack > Campaigns.

  1. Click on the Campaigns tab. Any segments you’ve created will be shown here, along with any prompts that belong to those segments.
  2. Filter by the campaign you want to work with.
  3. In the box for any segment, click the ? button to create a new prompt in that segment.
  4. To assign an existing prompt to a segment, click on the button for that prompt. In the Segment field, begin typing a segment’s name. Click on the autocomplete result for the segment to assign it. Prompts that have multiple segments will appear under each segment’s heading.

You may also assign a prompt to a segment while editing a prompt:

  1. Create a new prompt, or edit an existing one.
  2. In the right-hand column, with the Prompt tab selected, scroll down to the labelled Segmentation Settings.
  3. Choose the segments you want to assign the prompt to.
  1. Click Update.

Segmentation criteria

  1. Articles read is the number of posts that have been viewed in the past 30 days.
  2. Articles read in session is the number of views in the past 30 minutes.
  3. Newsletter allows segmentation based on subscriber status. A user is known to be a subscriber if they subscribe on the site or if they arrive to the site from a Newsletter link.
  4. Donation differentiates donors. Donation status is known if the donation occurs on-site for sites using the Newspack Reader Revenue features. For sites using News Revenue Hub checkout donor status is determined from Mailchimp configuration when a visitor comes to the site from a newsletter link. Additional approaches to determine donor status are currently being developed.
    • If your donations happen off-site, and donors are redirected to a page on-site after they make a donation, select that page in the settings. Once a reader views this page, they will be considered a donor. 
  5. Referrer allows segmentation for viewers arriving at the site from a link at a particular domain, e.g. twitter.com. Referrer can also be a comma-separated list, allowing multiple referrers (twitter.com,facebook.com) or multiple domains used by the same service.
  6. Referrer exclusion – similar to the above, but for targeting viewers not arriving at the site from a particular domain.
  7. Category affinity allows segmentation by post category. For example, if a user has viewed more posts in the “Sports” category than any other, they’ll fall into this segment. If they view a few “Politics” posts and this becomes the dominant category, they fall out of the segment.

Segmenting admin and editor users

While logged into WordPress as an admin or editor user, your session will be treated as a preview session. That is, for segmentation purposes, you will be seen as a new, anonymous reader. Your activity while browsing will affect your segmentation—for instance, if you sign up for a newsletter or view a certain number of articles, you will match those segmentation criteria. However, preview session data is purged each hour, so this activity data will not persist.

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