Personalize With the Power of Historical Targeting in VWO

Overview

Imagine the possibilities of delivering personalized experiences based on your visitors' past actions. VWO's Historical Targeting feature empowers you to do just that, crafting targeted campaigns that resonate deeply with your audience.

While configuring a Personalize campaign, you can apply pre-segmentation to your targets in the Targets section. You can also configure the segmentation based on past events. For example, you can target visitors who viewed your pricing page multiple times in the last month and present them with a special promotion on a higher-tier subscription. This lets you tap into visitors’ historical browsing patterns to deliver timely, relevant experiences.

Conditions to Apply Historical Targeting

VWO gathers data only when you share them with it. Until you pass on the data, VWO will not collect or hold any. To apply historical targeting, you need to ensure the following:

• The events should have been triggered to VWO for the period you want to target.
• You can only access the data from the last 90 days.

How to Implement Historical Targeting?

To implement historical targeting, create a Personalize campaign and follow these steps:

1. Go to Configuration > Targets.
2. Select the experience for which you want to configure historical targeting. In the segmentation box that appears, click Custom Segment to customize the pre-segmentation for individual experiences based on historical data.
3. Next, configure the custom segment. You can do that as follows:
   1. Using custom events
      
      Let’s imagine you’re running a travel agency where you want to target customers who purchased an airline ticket worth more than ₹20,000 in the last 7 days to offer them a discount on hotel bookings. You can create different experiences for various destinations and target the corresponding visitors based on their purchase amount and travel destination. 
      
      
      1. From the My Events tab, select an event that defines the purchase (for example, Purchase Complete).
      2. Set the condition as greater than or equal to 1 time to capture visitors who have completed the purchase at least once.
      3. Define the class (for example, Premium) for more targeted segmentation based on the booking type.
      4. Define the price range as the sum of purchase greater than 20000 using the +fx function.
      5. Set the time frame to target visitors who purchased in the last 7 days.
         
         
   2. Using the standard Page Visit event
      
      Suppose you are running a travel agency where you want to target customers who visited your Destination Packages page at least 3 times in the last 7 days. These customers are actively exploring travel options, and you’d like to offer them exclusive discounts on hotel bookings for the destinations they’re interested in.
      
      1. From the Standard Events tab, select Page visit.
      2. Set the condition as greater than or equal to 3 times to capture visitors who have landed on the Destination Packages page at least once.
      3. Select Page URL and then choose a matching pattern (for example, is equal to, is not equal to, contains). Based on the selected pattern, enter the URL or define a pattern that matches the relevant pages. For more information, see Using URL Patterns in VWO.
         
         For example, you can select the pattern as contains and enter the value as /destination-packages. This way, the condition captures all visitors who landed on any Destination Packages page (for example, /destination-packages/bali, /destination-packages/paris).
         
         Note: VWO supports historical targeting only for the Page URL option.
      4. Set the time frame to target visitors who visited these pages in the last 7 days.
4. Click Save Changes to apply the settings to your campaign.

Apply these steps appropriately for other experiences to offer relevant discounts on hotel bookings for travelers who match these criteria.