Introduction
Web behavior segmentation is based on visitor actions observed on your website that you can collect using Web Extend. For example, it allows you to target visitors who watched a video on your website, searched for a certain product or destination, or abandoned the checkout page because they thought that the shipping costs are too high.
New to Web Extend?
- Read more on how it works in the Web Extend - Overview article.
- Web Extend requires an initial setup on your website to work. For details, see Web Extend Data Collection API and Implementing the Web Extend data collection scripts.
- Both the General Web Behavior and Visitors who viewed content templates are based on Web Extend custom tags. For more information on custom tags, see tag.
How do Web behavior segments work?
Web behavior segments rely on data collected by Web Extend. Web Extend and mainly Web Extend tags are the requirements for using Web behavior segments. Web Extend collects business-specific events from your website that describe activities completely tailored to your goals - that is what Web Extend tags offer to your business.
Web behavior segment templates use custom tags to:
- describe activities without referencing the product catalog and
- support non-eCommerce use cases such as content and travel.
You have to add custom tags to your website besides the existing Web Extend events that describe your business cases and needs. Here you can see several examples of data that you should send as custom tags and how to create segments by using these custom fields.
Why should I be using Web behavior segments?
Web behavior segments allow you to react to your customers’ behavior observed on your website. By using Web behavior segments, you can:
- define crucial touch and action points in your sales funnel,
- enrich your buyer personas by utilizing the contacts' behavior data,
- send custom events as they occur with Web Extend and
- create behavior segments using historical data that are available in the Automation Center and on other channels.
You should consider using Web behavior segments if you would like to:
- track your customers across your website,
- record the activity of your contacts and
- retarget your customers on another channel based on their activities recorded in the last six months.
As opposed to the existing Emarsys solution related to recording your visitors’ behavior, Web behavior segments:
- are not limited to the last session,
- do not aggregate session behavior data with a couple of contact fields and
- enable you to use custom data.
Use cases for Web behavior segments
eCommerce
Let’s say that you have a jewelry web store and would like to reach identified visitors who searched for a specific product category or brand, and sorted the products listed on the page by their price in ascending order.
| General Web behavior template | Data integration with available criteria |
|---|---|
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Visitors with tag Where:
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*When using Web behavior segmentation, customers define their own tags.
Other use cases
You can reach contacts who:
- like to read articles belonging to specific categories or tagged articles on a blog in order to offer them product categories from your web store.
- viewed a product category but did not purchase anything from your web store.
- viewed a specific brand’s product pages.
- searched for a product category and sorted the products listed on the page by their price or customer rating in ascending or descending order.
- abandoned their cart during a flash sale in order to offer them the product at the same price on a different day.
- added an item belonging to a certain category to their wishlist in order to advertise items belonging to a similar category.
Content
Suppose that you provide your customers with various types of web content and you would like to boost cross-selling. In this case, first, you have to identify visitors who are interested in a specific topic so you can recommend topics from an article, blog post or video to them that might catch their attention.
| General Web behavior template | Data integration with available criteria |
|---|---|
|
Visitors with tag
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Other use cases
You can:
- reach contacts who like to read specific content categories or tagged articles in order to offer them a similar or upsell another article.
- reach contacts who clicked a link to know who visited your landing page by clicking a banner.
- reach contacts who downloaded a white paper in order to follow up them with the case.
- reach contacts who started to watch a video but did not finish it on your site in order to remind them.
- reach contacts who visited a site, played a video or downloaded something multiple times in order to offer similar content or further engagement possibilities to them.
- fire a custom tag when a visitor scrolls down to a content block on a page and reach contacts for whom the block was visible on the page.
Travel
Let’s say that you have a travel agency and would like to reach your website visitors who:
- are identified by their email addresses and
- searched for a last-minute holiday on the French Riviera in August.
However, you have not yet informed these contacts about your last minute offers.
| General Web behavior template | Data integration with available criteria |
|---|---|
Visitors with tag custom_search in the last 90 daysWhere:
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Other use cases
You can reach contacts who:
- searched for a flight, hotel, package or cruise with a certain check-in/departure or check-out/arrival date in order to remind them that they have abandoned their cart.
- booked a flight, hotel, package or cruise with a certain check-in or check-out date in order to sell ancillary products related to their journey.
- searched for a specific airline, destination or hotel chain in a city.
Creating a Web behavior segment
To create a Web behavior segment, proceed as follows:
1. Select Contacts > Segments, then click Create segment.
2. Choose Web behavior segment in the dialog.
3. Give your segment a name and you might add a description to it that helps you and your team identify the segment on the Segments page easily.
4. Choose a Web behavior segment template and configure it as required.
5. When you are finished, click Save & Apply.
Segment results are cached for 10 minutes. So, if you run the same segment again within 10 minutes, you will get the previous (cached) results.
Web behavior segment templates
The following Web behavior templates are available:
- Visitors who viewed pages in category - Select the timeframe, category and occurrence. This template is based on the Web Extend event category.
-
Visitors who viewed content - Select the timeframe and tag criteria. Tags allow you to collect data in the form that suits your particular use case. This template:
- is based on the custom tag
content_pageview, - contains predefined items that are used in general,
- you can add custom attributes.
- is based on the custom tag
-
General Web Behavior - This template is based on any
custom tag. You can add any custom attributes by using this template. You can filter contacts by specifying how many times a contact triggered a custom event in the last X days.
- The timeframe of the General Web Behavior template is limited to 180 days.
- Attribute filtering supports the following data types: string/text, number, date.
- This segment will not return those contacts who did not trigger the specified tag. To do so, you need to create a combined segment that includes all contacts whose opt-in value is
TRUEand excludes those ones who triggered the event with the specified tag at least once.
To create a segment that contains contacts who triggered a custom tag between 0-3 times, you need to create a combined segment that includes contacts whose opt-in value is TRUE and excludes those ones who triggered the specific custom tag at least 4 times.
Open Data
Web behavior segments use raw Web Extend events as data source. Web Extend events are uploaded to the Data Platform after session identification.
For more information on data available via Open Data, see Web session tags.
Known limitations
Web behavior segments cannot be created based on standard Web Extend events
You can only create Web behavior segments based on custom tags, except for the Visitors who viewed pages in category template which uses the category view standard Web Extend event. Once these are ready, you will need to create fewer custom events and more sets of data will be available out of the box.
The impact of sessions on Web behavior segment results
If a session was not saved into the Emarsys database, then it will affect your Web behavior segment results. A session is only saved into the Emarsys database if any of the following Web Extend commands are triggered and the session contains at least one record that is not NULL or empty:
Available events, tags and attributes are not displayed in the dropdown
Therefore, you have to be familiar with the exact name of the event, tag or attribute you would like to use. If you misspell the name of an event, tag or attribute, then it can lead to errors.
When typing the name of the event, tag or attribute please consider that these names are case sensitive.
Conditions are grouped by the AND operator and cannot be branched/nested, multi-select or comma-separated values are not supported
Therefore, we recommend using combined segments for complex use cases. It might happen that you have to create many segments when you would like to create a complex segment that covers multiple conditions.
Web Extend events and tags cannot be used for personalization
Currently, you cannot personalize Web Extend events and those parts of the tags that are used for Web behavior segments.
Processing Web Extend events, creating a session, identifying a user in a session and loading that data into the Data Platform can take up to 3 hours
Currently, it can take up to 3 hours to process Web Extend events, create a session, identify a user in a session and load that data into the Data Platform. If you would like to react to real-time web events, then we recommend using the Interactions.