Targeting: Tips and Tricks

This article will cover:

Targeting: A General Overview
1. Difference between All or Any
Basic Targeting Example
Advanced Targeting Example
Targeting Limits
Copy and Pasting Targeting Options

Targeting: A General Overview

The targeting screen is generally the same for rewards, challenges, groups, and channels. You can access the targeting panel by going to any of these pages, clicking on the Edit button, and viewing the Targeting tab. This tab will either be called Targeting or Eligibility. For this article, we are using the Groups Targeting settings as an example:

The first option in the Include Members area is Everyone. When selected, everyone in your hub will be included in the Group. This is useful for the cases when you want to include every advocate except a few people or a specific group of people added through the exclusion rule. Remember that exclusion rules always take precedence over inclusion rules.

For Group targeting, if you would like to only include manually added users in the group, simply leave the targeting rules empty.

To add a new line of the rule in the new Targeting UI, click on the Add rule button. To delete a rule, click on the 'X' next to the rule that you'd like to remove.

If you would like advocates who match specific criteria to see (or be excluded from) the Group, choose the criteria from the dropdown button. You will also note the option to include (and exclude) members who meet all or any of the conditions you choose.

Differences between All and Any

Please view this beautifully made InfluiTip video to explain the difference between using the "Any" or "All" switch - InfluiTip #12: Targeting Limits. Note that the Targeting UI is now different from the video since we've made improvements.

Criteria for inclusion falls into these groups:

Individuals: Specific advocates (you can search by typing their Name, Email address, or Title).
Group: The member is a member of a specific group in the Hub.
Advocate Info: Criteria based on information about the member (e.g. Industry, Region, Title, etc.). You can also choose fields with blank values.
Behaviour : How the member behaves in your hub (e.g. Engaged, Not Engaged, completed specific challenges, earned badges, etc.).
Response: Includes/Excludes advocates based on their response to a question from a specific challenge. You can choose to segment an exact response or a response which contains a certain word .

Never forget to target: If you implement segmentation from the start, it will boost your Influitive community's ability to adapt to future changes. You should create a group called "starter" or "all advocates" and add all of your advocates into that group. You should not leave anything targeted to everybody because that can open up a can of worms if you decide to make changes in the future (such as inviting a different segment of customers to your hub).

Basic Targeting Example

A template for this is available in the Challenge Template library. Finding out an advocates location is great for: targeting rewards (especially gift cards which are region oriented), targeting challenges and setting up reference calls with local advocates. It is also a good idea to pinpoint where your advocates come from for reporting.

You can target something to a location in that item's targeting settings, as seen below.

Workflow example

Advocate completes the ' Where are you located?' challenge and answers 'Canada'.
Advocate is placed in the Canada group (by targeting the group to the response Canada). Everyone who answers Canada will now be in this group.
A reward for an Amazon gift card in Canadian currency is available. This reward is targeted to people in the Canada group. Now people in the Canada group will see this reward, and it will be hidden from everyone else .

Advanced Targeting Example

If you want to really get to know your advocates and customize the hub experience for them, you can create a survey challenge asking advocates several questions that will help you segment them. You can then add advocates into groups based on their answers, and make those groups available to challenges that relate. Below is an example of what this can look like.

Examples of groups you can make based off of this:

Location (groups based on your customers' location)
Happy/Unhappy Customers (NPS score over or below a certain number)
Product Proficiency Levels
Interests (what your advocates want to see)

Targeting Limits

We've set targeting rules limit of 10 rules within the Inclusion and Exclusion areas, and a maximum of 100 values in each rule.

Why did we set these limits?

When too many rules are used in one challenge, it takes longer for targeting to update and can clog up the queue. Now imagine every hub on our system targets a challenge with complicated rules - that’s a really big backup and potentially even an outage. These targeting limits will keep our targeting queues under control, meaning shorter update times for you, and more long-term stability and scalability for our systems.

What does that mean?

Ten rules means 10 individual rows of targeting in total, within inclusion and exclusion rules. For example, you can target for advocate info: Email (when I say this create the rule) and that’s 1 rule. 100 unique values per rule means 100 inputs in each row. So you could put 100 email addresses into that advocate info rule we made. Do keep in mind that each row of rule targets ANY of the options included, not All. Once the limit is reached, you would not be able to add more rules.

What if I need to target more than the limit?

If you need more intricate or extensive targeting than these rules allow, consider creating multiple groups that includes these targeting. For example, you'd like to target a challenge to the users who have completed all 20 starter challenges. Here's how to do this:

Create Group 1 and include those who completed the first 10 starter challenges.
Then create Group 2 and include those who completed the last 10 challenges.
Once done, target the Challenge to the members who are members of both (select All) Group 1 and Group 2. This way, it will include everyone who completed the 20 starter challenges.

Other than that, you can mass import advocates who normally couldn’t be targeted together into a group, or you can target up to 10 rules for the group, then target that group for the challenge!

Copying and Pasting Targeting Options

If you are copying and pasting options into targeting and want to make sure each item is separated properly, add a double comma (,,) between each item. For example, here's a double comma-delimited list of World regions: Africa,,Asia,,The Caribbean,,Central America,,Europe,,North America,,Oceania.

Tip: If you have a long list of options where adding the double commas manually would take too long, use the "Find and Replace" feature in your favourite text editor. Set it to find whatever current delimiter (e.g. a single comma, a space, a line break) is in the list and replace it with ",,".

When you paste your list you will see an option to separate the values, clicking on it will itemize each item separated by the double comma.