Using Segmentation in VWO

Purpose of Using Segmentation in VWO

One of the major mistakes companies make when starting A/B testing activities is sticking to a small, basic audience. This does not yield the most meaningful results, or sometimes, the results could be misleading. If you want to have significant and valuable outcomes, you need to have a segmentation strategy in place.

Segmentation typically means splitting your website visitors or app visitors into different groups and categories. This grouping is done based on common needs and interests, allowing you to understand different groups’ behavior, thereby providing your website visitors with more relevant and targeted content. 

Using the various segmentation options provided by VWO, you can slice and dice your website traffic to understand visitor behavior and get deeper insights into how they are using the website.

In VWO, you can define the segments on various conditions like:

• Visitor type
• The source from where the visitor landed on your website
• Device used
• Geographical location
• Time
• Account data: Company-level attributes such as industry, revenue, and employee count for B2B account-based marketing use cases.
• Contact profile: Attributes such as job title, email, or lifecycle stage (for targeting specific individuals).
• Saved lists: Specific static or dynamic lists of accounts or contacts imported from your CRM or uploaded via CSV.

Types of Segmentation in VWO

VWO supports two types of segmentation, one for data collection called “Pre-segmentation”, and another for interpreting reports called “Post-Segmentation”. Let’s delve more into each of these:

Pre-segmentation

Using VWO's pre-segmentation options, you can collect the data for your test from a specific visitor segment, i.e., before running a VWO campaign, you can bucket your website visitors into different segments based on their source URL, device, location, company attributes, time, behavior, and other conditions.

For example, you might want to track data on your website through Facebook or Google ads for visitors residing in a specific country or based on a cookie value. Alternatively, for B2B campaigns, you can create a segment to target visitors who belong to companies in the Software industry with more than 500 employees.

When you target a visitor segment through a test, the visitors who meet the segment's conditions are eligible for the test. For example, you can create a segment for visitors who use Facebook on their iPhone device during XX – XX hours of the day.

For more information on how to apply pre-segmentation to your campaigns, see Defining Custom Visitor Segments in VWO.

Post segmentation

Using VWO's post segmentation options, you can slice and dice your visitor’s data after a campaign has run to analyze how visitors from a specific traffic segment interacted with your website. Understanding how different visitor groups interact with your website allows you to determine what works best for a segment and what does not.
For example, you can create a segment to view the reports of all the new visitors from Europe who clicked on the Products tab of your website using their iPad device.

For more information on how to apply post-segmentation to your campaigns, see Applying Segments in Data360.

Working with Segment Box in VWO

The Segment box of VWO is divided into three sections:

1. Standard Segments: This section allows you to target a particular group of visitors with your test or variations by selecting a segment from the predefined segments. In addition, it allows you to slice and dice your campaign reports for different visitor segments of your website.  After a thorough analysis of the most commonly used conversion tracking scenarios and use cases, we have created the Standard Segments. When you choose a segment from the Standard Segments section, a summary of the segment's configurations appears on the right.
    
2. My Segments: You can access your saved segments in this section. Using this section, you can quickly access and reuse the segments in your tests without creating them from scratch. When you select a segment here, its definition appears on the right, providing an overview of how the segment is configured. In addition, you can Edit, Clone, or Delete your saved segment. To learn how you can do this, refer to What are Saved Segments in VWO?.
    
3. Custom Segment: This section allows you to segment your visitors based on custom conditions, such as the browser or device used to access your website.  If you have VWO Data Studio enabled for your account, you can also use this section to select ABM Account and ABM Contact attributes (like Job Title or Account Name) or target specific Saved Lists imported from your CRM. For more information, see Create an ABM-Based Target Audience.

Configure a Custom Segment

Custom visitor segmentation allows you to group website visitors based on shared characteristics such as behavior, demographics, device details, or browsing context. Visitors belonging to a different subgroup are likely to behave or buy in the same way. You can create segments by specifying the conditions that allow VWO to decide which segment a visitor is eligible for and run the correct test or variation.

VWO supports both standard segmentation criteria and advanced B2B segmentation through Account-Based Marketing (ABM) data managed in VWO Data Studio. The available ABM options enable you to create segments using firmographic attributes (company-level details) and contact-level attributes (individual properties) imported from your CRM or uploaded via CSV.

This section explains how to configure custom segments using these criteria so you can precisely control who is included in your campaigns and ensure they reach the most relevant audiences.

1. Log in to your VWO account.
2. Go to Insights or Testing and select a test you want to work with.
3. On the Configuration tab, click Audience and Traffic.
4. Go to the Custom Segment section, select a category and a condition to run your test for a particular visitor group.
   Alternatively, go to the My Segments tab and select a segment that you have created.
5. From the first dropdown, select a segment type. To learn more about the available options, refer to Available Options For Configuring Custom Segments.
6. From the second dropdown, select an operation. In the field next to it, enter details for the selected segment condition such as URL details, query parameters, location, and so on.
7. To create a complex visitor segment, use brackets and/or operators to define your conditions.
   
   1. If you wish to create a segment with multiple conditions, use Add another condition option to add a new condition.
   2. To combine one or more conditions into a compound condition, use and/or operators.
   3. Use the Copy option if you wish to clone conditions. For example, if you create a condition and want a similar one with slight changes, you can clone the existing condition rather than creating one from scratch.