A URL Visited Audience organizes your website visitors based on pages or products they browse using the unique part of the URL. Your should create a URL Visited audience whenever you want to segment your website visitors based on the specific pages they have viewed. This is a fundamental and highly effective retargeting strategy.
Here are some specific use cases for using URL Visited Audiences to segment your website traffic:
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Retargeting Cart Abandoners: This is one of the most common and successful retargeting strategies. You create an audience of users who visited the
/cartor/checkoutURL but did not visit the/purchase-completeURL. You then serve them ads with a special offer or a reminder about the items they left behind. -
Product-Specific Retargeting: For an e-commerce site, you can create a unique audience for each product category (e.g.,
/electronics/,/clothing/,/home-goods/). This allows you to show visitors ads for the exact products they were browsing, which is highly effective for driving conversions. You can also use "wildcard" characters () to capture all URLs within a specific category, for example,www.mywebsite.com/category/*. -
Upselling and Cross-selling: Create an audience of people who have already purchased a specific product (by visiting the thank you page for that product) and then show them ads for complementary products. For example, if someone bought a coffee maker, you could show them ads for coffee beans or filters.
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Creating High-Intent Audiences: Identify and target visitors who have shown a strong signal of interest. This could be people who have viewed a high value product page, your pricing page, a demo request page. You can then serve them more direct-response ads.
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Excluding Existing Customers: To prevent ad fatigue and save money, you can exclude audiences who have already converted. This is particularly useful for subscriptions or one-time purchases, where you don't want to show the same "buy now" ad to someone who has already bought.
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Sequential Messaging: Guide visitors through your sales funnel with a series of targeted ads. For instance, show an ad about your product's benefits to someone who visited your homepage. If they then visit your features page, you can show them an ad with a testimonial or a limited-time offer.
Create a URL Visited Audience
- Log in to AdRoll and navigate to Audiences > Website Audiences.
- Click New Audience.
- Under Audience Typed, select URL Visited from the drop-down.
- Enter the unique URL rule from your website.
- Give your audience a name that makes it easy to find later.
- Select the audience duration based on how long to keep a person in this audience.
- Only mark the checkbox ‘This is a conversion audience' if you wish to specify this as a Conversion Audience, for example to track a buyer completed a purchase).
- When you're finished, click Create Audience.
Wildcards
When configuring AdRoll Website Audiences the asterisk acts as a wildcard symbol, representing any combination of letters or characters within a URL. This means it can cover every URL across your entire website.
URL Visited audiences utilize two special characters: * and ?. These wildcards are placeholder variables that represent either a single character or a string of characters.
Larger audiences allow for better campaign optimization. Unless your website receives thousands of daily visitors, we do not recommend defining your audience using an individual URL. Instead, use special characters to create more general URL Viewed rules for audience definition.
For more details on how wildcards are used, please refer to this article.
URL Patterns
A URL pattern is a unique series of letters and characters that appears in the URLs of your site pages. Use your URL patterns when you're setting up your URL Viewed audience.
For example, www.adroll.com/category/section/page/
- If you create an audience with the URL pattern */category/section/page/, your audience will capture any traffic to that specific page.
- If you create an audience with the URL pattern: */category/*, your audience will capture any traffic to a page that contains the phrase /category/