Audiences Overview
Audiences let you define groups of users based on rules, so you can show the right content to the right people. Instead of displaying every flow to every user, audiences allow you to target specific segments based on user properties, device characteristics, and custom attributes.
What Are Audiences?
An audience is a named set of targeting rules that evaluates to true or false for a given user. When a user matches all the rules in an audience, they are considered a member of that audience and will see any content targeted to it.
Audiences are defined in the dashboard and evaluated client-side by the Runtime SDK. This means targeting decisions happen instantly without additional API calls, ensuring flows appear without delay.
How Targeting Works
Each audience contains a rule tree -- a hierarchical structure of conditions combined with AND/OR logic. When the SDK loads, it evaluates the rule tree against the current user's context:
- The SDK collects the user's context (user ID, traits, device info, browser, location).
- For each audience attached to a piece of content, the targeting engine evaluates the rule tree.
- If the rule tree evaluates to
true, the content is displayed. Otherwise, it is suppressed.
The evaluation result includes whether the user matched and how many individual rules were satisfied, which is useful for debugging.
Use Cases
| Scenario | Example Rule |
|---|---|
| Onboard new users | traits.signupDate is within the last 7 days |
| Target by role | role equals admin |
| Mobile-only content | device.type equals mobile |
| Feature-specific help | traits.plan is in ["pro", "enterprise"] |
| Regional targeting | location.country equals US |
Managing Audiences
From the Audiences page in the dashboard, you can:
- Create a new audience with the visual rule builder or from a preset template
- Edit an existing audience's name, description, or rule tree
- Delete audiences that are no longer needed
- Search audiences by name to quickly find the one you need
- Evaluate an audience against a test user context to verify it works as expected
Audiences are scoped to your company. Each audience has a unique ID, name, optional description, and a createdAt/updatedAt timestamp.
Next Steps
- Audience Builder -- Learn how to construct rules with the visual builder
- Audience Presets -- Start quickly with pre-built audience templates