Slice and Dice Your Target Audience For Better A/B Testing Results

For an astrobiology junkie…

This law is to find out the actual researchable objects that strike our orbit.

Measure the output with this formula,

RO — Researchable Objects

AO — Alien Objects

D — Debris

In terms of website and target audience,

Researchable objects [RO]= Target Audience [TA]

Alien objects [AO]= Total Visitors [TV]

Debris [D]= Unwanted Visitors [UV]

By applying equivalent units, (This law is applicable only if you know your target audience).

I am a little partial to my type of people. I love quantum physics!

R and R ends here… :D

Further down, on a serious tone, in this article I will rack-off all the information that I learnt about the best methods to target audience in A/B testing and its significance.

On a broader perspective there are only five different types of audiences who you may want to exclude or include in your experiment.

Target via query parameter

Let’s begin with an example…

Being an e-commerce store, you may want to run a campaign promoting your Thanksgiving offer.This offer might seem more appropriate to visitors from United States than to those from South Asia.

In this case, you can build a dedicated landing page for audiences from preferred places. And with the help of google’s URL builder or the UTM generator, you can have separate query strings assigned for each campaign you run.

This way, whenever visitors come through the campaign and land on your website, you can track them down using the unique query string you assigned for the visitor.

Target audience based on browser type

You may want to exclude or include visitors based on the type of browsers they use.

For example: If your new landing page is supposed to push a subscription modalafter few seconds of the page load, then having it targeted to visitors from mobile browsers won’t be a good idea.

A responsive website may dawdle a little on mobile browsers than on the desktop browser, thus as a result, excluding mobile visitors from your target audience can bring in more effective/actionable leads.

Target audience who come from referral URL

Visitors from third party websites such as Twitter and Yelp are more probably looking for deals. Their behavior and keenness vary from those who come by way of organic search or blogs. Certainly, they need to bid on the deal and leave the website as soon as they can.

Considering scenarios like this, to attain quality results from your running experiment, you can choose to exclude or include these visitors.

If you want to include these visitors, you may have to show them the ‘Bonanza Sale’. But if you are excluding them, you can probably lay out the other set of sky-high offers allied to your products.

Target audience using cookie value/visitor type

Visitor cookies are particularly useful when other tracking methods won’t work. For eg.

The most dominant way to highlight your call-to-action button is via modals orinline pop-ups, the performance of which cannot be tracked through traditional methods.

Modals don’t have a unique URL. Hence, due to its dynamic nature, it’s tough to monitor its performance.

To solve this conflict, first, you need to segregate visitors between who must or mustn’t see these elements. And that can be done if you store cookies of every visitor the first time they come to your website.

For example: If you want to show ‘Coupon’ modal only to visitors who are revisiting your website, use cookie value to track the reappearing visitors.

Apart from the above-mentioned techniques, here are some other ways you can apply to run your experiments for the distinct set of audience.

Device Type — Show the variant to only those on iPad.

Mobile Device — Only include android users.

Browser — Those who are from Chrome

User Agent — Mention a unique User Agent (string) to track which browser/device the visitor is using every time to look at your website.

Day Of The Week — Track visitors who are on your website/campaign page on the particular day of the week.

Hour Of The Day — The specific time of the day when visitors are accessing your website/campaign page.

Location — Run experiment for audience depending on their geography ( the place from where they are accessing your page).

Javascript Variable — Create a separate JS variable and run only for users who pass the mentioned JS condition.

IP4/IP6 — Consider visitors only from specific IP address.

Seemingly, these are the best and widely used targeting methods to see which audience type suit the product/service the most.

Buddy. You deserve to know a little more since you read the entire $#!* I have written.

If you are a Venutian and knew whatever I had deciphered in this script, go ahead and start A/B testing.

If you searched for ‘Venutian’ or any other terms from this script on Google? You really need this guide.

Yes! I wrote it for humans. Carry on 😃

Send these →👏 👏 👏 how much ever you can…😃