Audience splits
Audience Spits are a feature of Activate that allows you to split your activated audience into 50/50 or 90/10 for experimentation. In this article will walk you through what Audience Splits are, how to use them, and help you understand the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Where is it?
Audience Split is a feature located within Lexer Activate. You’ll find it in your final stage of the standard activation work-flow. By leaving the auto-update audience option unchecked you’ll see the Split Audience options within the activation details column, you’ll find split audiences arriving on your activated channel. Just select how you’d like to divide your audience and when you activate your Segment. It’ll arrive at its destination as two lists or as having alternate tags as supported by platforms like Mailchimp.
How can I split my audience?
When activating an audience, by default the audience split option is not checked. This ensures you don’t accidentally split all your audiences, and only do it when you really need to. To apply a split to your audience, just check which split option you’d like and the platform does the rest for you.
With Audience Split, you have three options:
- No Split
- A/B Split
- Control Group Split
Don’t Split - 100%
The no split option is checked by default. Leaving this checked will send your audience to your channel in its entirety.
Generate A/B splits - 50%/50%
When generating an A/B split, Lexer Activate perfectly splits your audience down the middle and delivers two even audiences to your selected channel. You can differentiate them by the (A) or (B) we append to each audience name or tag.
A/B splits are typically utilized by marketers to measure campaign variations with each variation designated to one of the two 50/50 splits. Each of the variations are then measured for marketers to use tools to judge the impact of each variation. We have prepared a guide on how to prepare an A/B audience split to help you find what the attributes of a successful are.
Generate Control group split — 10%/90%
A control group cuts out 10% of your audience and sends both the 10% and 90% to your given channel. Your given channel will receive two new audiences with either ‘control’ (10%) or ‘experiment’ (90%) appended to the end of your new custom audience names.
Control groups are used by marketers who want to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. The control group is a section of your total audience who will not receive the marketing communications. This ensures you can compare the actions of the targeted group, against the natural actions of your control group. We have prepared a guide to preparing control groups that further explores use cases of control groups.
Please note that we do not support auto-updating audiences with audience splits.
Identifying which profiles have been involved in Audience splits
Once an audience has been split, the profiles involved will be given an Included in Audience attribute. This attribute will record all splits this profile has been involved in as a list. Let's have a look at a few examples in the Fitness Co Hub.
Finding your split audiences
If you would like to find these audiences, you can search for all profiles that contain the Included in Audience attribute.
- Navigate to Understand > Segment.
- Search for the Included in Audience attribute.
- Within this attribute search for the activation that you used to split your audience. You will see appropriate tags that denote the separate audiences depending on the integration used. This will usually be seen as a suffix (A) or (B) on your audience name.
Looking for an individual profile
Want to check to see whether a specific client was part of your A or B audience split? Head on over to the Segment builder and find out.
Let's assume Fitness Co has just carried out an activation to Twitter for their High value Male lookalike seed segment and we have carried out an audience split (please see our A/B splits and Control group splits articles for detailed instructions). We can see in the screenshot of Activate below that this activation has been split. Let's use this segment to find some profiles.
To find out if a profile has been included in this audience:
- Navigate to Understand > Segment.
- Use the filters to narrow down the segment based on the information you know.
- Click on the Profiles tab and select a profile.
- Once open, click on attributes and search for the Included in Audience attribute. If an activation is listed here, the profile was included in that activation.
This allows you to thoroughly search through and examine the audiences yourself; whilst giving you the power to measure differences and impacts within your segments.
That's a wrap!
That's all for splitting your audience! We've talked about what splitting your audience is, how to find it, and generating different control groups. If you have any questions please reach out to Support at support@lexer.io.
