Audience Targeting
Target Elevate A/B Testing experiments to specific visitors using quick selectors or the custom audience builder, which combines thirteen dimensions including Shopify Market, referring domain, and cus
Audience targeting controls which visitors are eligible to enter an experiment. It is available on every experiment type, at Step 4 of 5: Audiences, and it works the same way whether you are testing a price, a page, a theme, an image, or custom code.
You can target as loosely as "mobile visitors" or as tightly as "logged out visitors from the UK market, arriving from a Meta campaign, landing on a specific product page". Thirteen dimensions are available and they combine, so the practical limit is your traffic rather than the tool.
Every rule you add makes your audience smaller and your experiment slower. That trade is the whole discipline of this page.
Two ways to target
Quick selectors
The Audience Targeting card on the Audiences step
Device, visitor type, traffic source, country, and single UTM values
Create Custom Audience
The Create Custom Audience button on the same card
Everything else, multiple conditions, OR logic, and any dimension not exposed as a quick selector
Quick selectors cover the common cases in one click. The custom audience builder is where the real narrowing happens.
Quick selectors
The Audience Targeting card exposes four groups. Each defaults to including everyone, so an experiment with nothing changed here runs on all traffic.
Device Type
Select All Devices, Desktop, Tablet, or Mobile.
Device is the most common targeting decision for a reason. A change to a sticky bar, a drawer, or an image gallery often behaves completely differently across breakpoints, and a mobile win averaged against a desktop loss reads as no result at all.
Visitor Type
Select All Visitors, New Visitors Only, or Returning Visitors Only.
A visitor counts as returning when Elevate A/B Testing recognises them from a previous visit in the same browser. Someone who clears cookies, switches browsers, or moves from phone to desktop is treated as new.
This distinction matters more than it looks. New visitors have no prior expectation of your store, so they are the honest audience for a price change or a redesign. Returning visitors are the honest audience for anything about repeat purchase, and they will react to a price change partly because they remember the old price.
UTM Parameters
Four buttons, one per parameter: Select utm_source, Select utm_medium, Select utm_campaign, and Select utm_content.
Selecting one opens the UTM Parameter dialog:
Confirm or change the parameter in the UTM Parameter dropdown.
Choose a Rule.
Type a value in Value and press Enter to add it. Add as many values as you need.
Select Apply & Confirm.
UTM parameters are tags you add to your own links, in ads, emails, and social posts. If your links do not carry them, these rules match nothing.
Traffic
Two dropdowns, Source and Country, both defaulting to All.
Source is the referrer classification: direct, search, and the major social and ad platforms. Country covers all countries.
Create Custom Audience
Select Create Custom Audience to open the Add Custom Audience dialog and build rules from the full dimension set.
Each rule is three fields:
Dimension
What you are matching on
Rule
How you are matching it
Value
What you are matching against
Build one:
Select Create Custom Audience.
In Rule #1, choose a Dimension. The rule group takes the dimension's name once selected.
Choose a Rule. The available rules change with the dimension.
Enter or select a Value.
Select Add another rule for each further condition.
Set the group logic to AND or OR using the selector between rules.
Select Save Rules.
Use the delete icon beside a rule to remove it.
Dimension reference
Thirteen dimensions are available in the custom audience builder.
Device Type
The device the visitor is browsing on
Mobile
Visitor Type
Whether the visitor has been to your store before
New
Country
The visitor's country
United States
Market
The Shopify market the visitor is assigned to
Europe
Traffic Source
Where the visitor came from
Direct, Google, Facebook
Page URL
Any part of the URL the visitor is viewing
/products?id=123 or /products
Referring Domain
The domain the visitor arrived from
facebook.com
Entry Page
The first page URL the visitor landed on
/products/shoes
utm_source
The ad platform or website
facebook, tiktok, google
utm_medium
The type of ad platform
social, paidsocial, search, cpc
utm_campaign
The specific campaign
black-friday-sale
utm_content
The specific ad or creative
black-friday-video
Customer Authentication
Whether the visitor is logged in
Logged in
Three of these are worth knowing about specifically, because they unlock targeting the quick selectors cannot reach.
Market
Market targets Shopify markets rather than countries. If you run markets with their own currencies, pricing, or catalogues, this is the dimension that matches how your store is actually configured. Targeting Country when your pricing is set per market gives you a segment that does not correspond to a pricing rule, which is the wrong shape for a price experiment.
Referring Domain
Referring Domain matches the exact domain the visitor came from, where Traffic Source matches a broad classification. Use Traffic Source for "all social traffic" and Referring Domain when you need one publisher, one affiliate, or one partner site separated from the rest.
Customer Authentication
Customer Authentication separates logged in visitors from logged out ones. Logged in visitors are typically existing customers with saved details and a shorter path to purchase, so mixing them with first time logged out visitors averages two very different funnels into one number.
This is the dimension to reach for when testing anything account related: a returning customer promotion, a saved cart experience, a members only price, or a checkout that behaves differently for a recognised customer.
Rules
The rules available depend on the dimension. Text dimensions such as Page URL and the UTM parameters offer the full set. List dimensions such as Country and Device Type offer membership rules.
Is one of
Matches if the value is any of the selected options
Is not
Matches if the value is none of the selected options
Equals
Matches only an exact match of the text you enter
Not Equal
Matches anything other than the text you enter
Contains
Matches if the text appears anywhere in the value
Does not contain
Matches if the text does not appear in the value
Starts with
Matches if the value begins with the text
Ends with
Matches if the value ends with the text
Two rules that catch people out:
Equals on a URL. Page URL matches against any part of the URL including query parameters, so Equals on a bare path fails for every visitor arriving with tracking parameters attached. Use Contains or Starts with for anything receiving campaign traffic.
Equals on a UTM value. UTM values match what your links actually carry. If half your ads send Facebook and half send facebook, Equals catches one half. Use Contains, or fix the links.
AND and OR logic
The selector between rules sets the logic for the group. With AND, the dialog reads All conditions in this group must match, and a visitor must satisfy every rule. With OR, any single rule is enough.
The distinction is the difference between narrowing and widening:
AND narrows. Each rule removes visitors. Three ANDed rules can easily leave you with two percent of your traffic.
OR widens. Each rule adds visitors. Use it to gather several sources or markets into one audience.
Before reaching for OR on a single dimension, check whether the rule already takes multiple values. Country is one of accepts a list, and Value in the UTM dialog accepts several values pressed in one at a time. One rule with three values is simpler to read later than three ORed rules.
Worked examples
Mobile shoppers in your European market
For a layout change that only exists on mobile, in the market where your pricing and catalogue are set up for it.
Cold traffic from one paid campaign
The audience a landing page built for that campaign was actually designed for. Existing customers who happen to click the ad are excluded, so they do not flatten the result.
One affiliate partner's traffic
Isolates a single partner's referrals arriving on collection pages, which is the setup for testing a landing experience negotiated with that partner.
Returning customers, several markets
A returning customer experience across two markets, without pulling in first time visitors whose behaviour would tell you nothing about repeat purchase.
How narrow is too narrow?
Every AND multiplies the reduction. Take the cold paid traffic example: if mobile is 60 percent of traffic, paid social is 15 percent of that, and this campaign is a third of paid social, you are running on roughly 3 percent of your visitors.
On 20,000 visitors a week, that is 600. An experiment needing 10,000 per arm will not finish this year.
Do the arithmetic before launching, not after two silent weeks. If the number is too small, you have three options:
Drop the least essential rule
The rule was preference rather than hypothesis
Launch broadly and segment the report
You want the insight, not the isolation
Accept a longer run
The traffic supports it and the question is worth the wait
The general rule: target for the hypothesis, not for preference. "Does this work on mobile?" earns a device rule. "I mostly care about mobile" does not, because the report can tell you that afterwards without costing you the sample.
Targeting, isolation, and allocation
Three controls decide who sees what. They are separate, and they apply in this order:
Audience targeting
Is this visitor eligible for the experiment?
Traffic isolation
Of the eligible visitors, what share should enter?
Traffic allocation
Of the visitors who entered, who sees control and who sees each variation?
Targeting filters first. Isolation then takes its percentage of whoever survived the filter, not of your total traffic. A 10 percent isolation on an audience that is already 3 percent of your store leaves you with 0.3 percent.
See Traffic Isolation for the second control, which is also Elevate A/B Testing's mutual exclusivity mechanism.
When targeting is evaluated
Targeting is checked when a visitor first becomes eligible. If they match, they enter and are assigned a variation, and that assignment persists across sessions. If they do not match, they see your original experience and never appear in the experiment's results.
This means a visitor whose circumstances change later does not move. Someone who first arrived on desktop stays in the desktop assignment even if they return on mobile, because the experiment recognises them as an existing participant rather than re-evaluating them.
Targeting versus personalizations
Targeting inside an experiment decides who is measured, against a control, for a limited period. A Personalization decides who permanently receives an experience, with no control group and no measurement of lift.
The productive sequence runs one into the other: launch an experiment broadly, read the segmented report, find the segment that responded, then build a personalization for that segment. Targeting narrowly from the start skips the step that tells you which segment was worth targeting.
Next steps
Traffic Isolation for capping what share of your eligible audience enters the experiment
Experiment Lifecycle for when targeting is evaluated and when a visitor's assignment locks in
Reading Your Results for segmenting a broadly launched experiment instead of targeting it narrowly
Personalizations for permanently serving an experience to a segment once an experiment has proven it
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