The Marketer's guide Audience

In Marketing Factory, audience is the generic term used to designate your entire population of visitors, independently of being anonymous or identified. Each record of a unique visitor is called a profile. This chapter will explain the features and functionality available in the audience module of the software, as well as how to search and export selected profiles.

1 To access the audience entry page

• Click on the arrow in front of the Audience entry. A submenu appears.
• Click on Visitors

2 Audience page

When accessing the audience page, Marketing Factory provides a simple dashboard.

1. Some statistical information to see at a glance how your repository of visitors and your traffic is evolving.
   • a. The total number of unique profiles collected.
   • b. New visits to the site in the last 30 days. The absolute number and a % compared to the previous 30 days.
   • c. Returning visits in the last 30 days. The absolute number and a % compared to the previous 30 days.
   • d. Pages viewed in the last 30 days. The absolute number and a % compared to the previous 30 days.
2. Three tabs
   • a. Manage visitors, which is the one selected by default.
   • b. Contacts (and number of contacts).
   • c. Leads (and number of leads).
3. A search field.
4. A menu to:
   • a. Run an advanced search (by criterion)
   • b. Run a feature to export profiles.

3 Searching for profiles

Marketing Factory offers two methods to search in your profiles repository Full Text and Advanced Search.

3.1 Full text search

This search option is accessible directly from the dashboard. Simply type the search term(s) you are looking for in the search field.

The list of matching profiles is displayed in real-time under the search field as you type.

Note that this search feature works on all profile properties, not only the name property or the ones displayed in the table. As a result, you may have to click on the profile details to see where the search term is being used and / or stored in the profile.

In the below example, the search term paris provides one result.

 You can access the profile details (and edit them manually) by clicking on the edit icon.

If we select the profile details of the above example, we see that the visitor lives in Paris (city = Paris), which is why this profile appeared in the search results.

You can assign a profile to one or multiple lists by clicking on the list icon, which is more convenient than going into the profile page itself if you have multiple profiles to assign.

You can also delete a profile from the results list. Beware that this deletion cannot be undone. All data about this user will be completely lost.

In summary, the simple search is a powerful, convenient and very fast way to find profiles but is not very granular. To receive a more precise extraction of your visitors, you should use the advanced search.

3.2 Advanced search

To do an advanced search (by criteria), click on the top right menu and choose advanced search.

This opens an overlay window.

The advanced search works similar to the conditions builder.

First, click on New condition and choose the type of condition you want to request.

Search conditions in Marketing Factory are always divided into five categories to make your work easier:

1. Goals: all the goals you have previously created for your site or campaigns.
2. Past events: any navigation action the user may have performed on your site.
3. Profile interest: the fact that a specific interest has a certain value.
4. Profile property: any property that has been collected.
5. Profile segment: the fact that visitors belongs to one or several segments.

When the search has been launched, Marketing Factory returns the list of matching profiles and the following toolbox appears on top of the result list.

As soon as an advanced search has been performed, the search criteria apply until you decide to cancel the search. This means that if you go into the Contacts or Leads pages, Marketing Factory will provide the list of visitors in those segments that also match your search, so you do not have to re-define your search when moving from one page to another.

Using the search toolbox, you can:

1. Modify your search scope without re-typing everything (Edit search).
2. Create a new segments based on your search conditions (Save as segment). Just enter a name for this new segment (mandatory) and a description. To enable the segment immediately, leave the enabled box checked. To share the segment with other realms, check the box. (See the Chapter Segments for detailed information.)

Create a static list that will contain all the visitors returned by your search (Save as list).

Lets assume that we want to save all the new visitors where the first visit occurred in the month of June 2015. We would then do the following advanced search:

Then we save the result in a new list that we will be able to use later for a personalized drip campaign. Storing this search as a segment would not make much sense because, once the month of June is through, the list will always remain the same. (It is not possible to have a new visitor access the site in June 2015 once you are in the new month of July 2015.) Accordingly, a static list of all those visitors is much more appropriate. Click on Save as list to create the list.

Give a name to the list and a description, then click on CREATE.

4. Remove all search filters currently active (Cancel search).

4 Exporting profiles

At any time, you can export visitor profiles into a convenient CSV format. This format can be opened in Microsoft ExcelÒ or similar spreadsheet editors. It can be imported by default into nearly every third-party system you may want to use, such as: databases, mail automation and newsletter systems, CRM, ERP, etc.

To export ALL profiles, follow this procedure:

• Click on the Visitors page entry in left menu. (Display the default audience page)
• Click on the upper right menu. (Display a sub-menu)
• Choose Export. (The download starts)

The export feature is contextual to the current search scope. If you have an on-going search, then only the profiles found for this search scope will be exported. This is true both for simple search (full text) and advanced search (criteria).

Also, if you go into the Contacts page or the Leads page, the export feature will apply only to the visitors that match the contact or lead conditions.

5 Contacts and Leads tabs

Contacts and Leads pages, accessible by clicking on the top bar tabs (blue-green background) display subsets of your entire audience that match a predefined criteria.

By convention, Marketing Factory divides your audience into three categories:

1. Visitors: all the visitors who came at least once to your site. Obviously, this population can be very large with lots of nearly empty profiles, fake profiles due to spammers or automated bot visits.
2. Contacts: this refers to the visitors on whom we have collected at least one data point that allows you to start a direct conversation: email address, telephone, address, Facebook ID, LinkedIn ID.... even if you do not have the visitor name.

Leads: are the contacts that have been assigned to someone responsible for engaging with the contact, usually in a sales process.

Note that for each of those profile groups, Marketing Factory tells you how many matching profiles are stored in the profile repository.

As a matter of fact, contacts and leads are nothing else than pre-built segments shipped within Marketing Factory. They respect conditions that can be fully customized by the user.

Contacts and Leads pages provide more details than the default visitors page because more data has been collected about visitors belonging to these groups.

5.1.1 Using the tools above the list of profiles

You can:

• Search in the list of contacts or list of leads by using the search form. The search is a full text search over all properties. The list is updated in real-time as you type.
• Change the number of records displayed in the page (which is 10 by default).
• Change the columns that are displayed. A click on the
  
   icon brings up the list of available properties.

Check or uncheck the properties you want to display in the table.

The changes occur in real-time so you can check / uncheck several items.

Finally, click outside of the drop-down menu to see your screen, which can be very different from its original state.