Target an audience with your chatbot

Using audiences helps you tailor the chat experience for each subset of visitors as they navigate through your website. You can segment website visitors into audiences and target them with relevant conversations. Throughout unlimited websites, you can use this to target audiences in a specific region, associated with a campaign, based on their activity, and other personalized options.

What is an audience? 

An audience is a group of website visitors who meet specific parameters, as defined by you in Targeted chatbot settings. This could be where they're located (based on their IP), a specific campaign you're running (identifiable by landing page or UTM code), how many times they've visited your website, or how many times they've engaged with a chatbot on your website. 

A visitor's behavior may trigger a chatbot to pop up on the website, prompting a conversation. This happens if they meet the parameters of the audience you've defined and if their behavior fits the targeting parameters. Their behavior is defined based on the time they've spent on the site (for instance, if they've stayed longer than 15 seconds) and the current page URL they're on (for example, the pricing page may be targeted with a different chatbot than the home page).  


Figure 1: Your website, audiences, and chatbots

Identify audiences

OnceHub identifies whether a visitor meets the parameters for a specific audience when they arrive at your website. Each time they arrive, a new session is started. If they leave the page, a session resets 30 minutes after they loaded the last page view.

When you create a new audience, you can configure one from scratch or select from a pre-configured template to edit based on your preferences.

To identify your audience, go to:

  1. Chatbots Targeted bot settings.
  2. Click on the Audiences.

You can create one or more rules for each audience you create, based on multiple parameters. 

Figure 2: Identification step

Possible parameters include: 

  • Country: The country of the visitor, based on their IP address.
  • UTM campaign: Arriving to your website through a specific UTM campaign identified in the URL.
  • Landing page URL: The landing page URL through which they entered your website.
  • Visits to website: How many times they've visited your website (based on sessions, resetting after 30 minutes inactivity). New visitors have visited one time. Return visitors have visited more than one time. 
  • Previous conversations: How many times they've engaged with a chatbot on your website. This includes any time they replied to the initial message, even if they did not continue. 
  • Contact field: Information gathered on a contact from a previous visit, such as company size, product interest, or any other fields you define in OnceHub. Learn more about contact fields

When you've finished identifying audiences, we recommend building your chatbot conversation(s) next. 

Common scenarios

Route visitors to meet with the right team

You may have a separate landing page for each vertical you're targeting through popular Google searches, with content catering to their needs and interests. 

As your website visitors navigate to your website, OnceHub will identify them by their vertical, based on the relevant landing page. 

Each chatbot they see can have its own unique messaging and also be configured to route the audience for that vertical to the right sales team in your organization.

New and returning visitors

You can create separate audiences for new website visitors and returning website visitors. By providing different content to new visitors vs. returning, you'll present the right context for drawing their notice and taking the next step toward a successful, engaging interaction. 

For instance, new visitors probably aren't familiar with your services, whereas returning visitors have already seen your website and may be closer to conversion. 

You can be more specific with returning visitors as well, based on the number of times they've visited or a field value they provided on their last visit, perhaps when they engaged with a chatbot. Someone who has already engaged with a chatbot or returned multiple times likely has a higher intent and more engagement than one who has returned just once, or returned but didn't engage. 

You can create a higher intent audience by creating a special Audience just for visitors who already answered out a specific question on their previous visit. You can select a chatbot curated to personalize this Audience's experience even further. For instance, "Welcome back! Still interested in learning more about ABC Product?" 

Target visitors who returned multiple times by setting the number of visits to 5, or whichever amount you consider indicates a higher intent toward conversion. 

Once you've identified these audiences, you can create chatbots with conversations relevant to their experience, such as: 

  • First time visitors welcome chatbot
  • First time visitors pricing chatbot
  • Returning visitors welcome chatbot
  • Returning visitors pricing chatbot
  • Highly engaged returning visitors

Targeting an audience with bots

Before the targeting step, first you should have identified your audiences and built your chatbot conversations. Once you've done that, you're ready to target audiences with specific chatbots. 

Once you've built your chatbot conversations, you can consider when and where visitors should engage with those specific chatbots.

In the left-hand menu, select Targeting.

You can build one or multiple different chatbots, targeted throughout the website, based on the rules you create. 

Figure 1: Targeting an audience with chatbots

Possible parameters include: 

  • Time on site: Based on the exact number of seconds they've been on your website.
  • Current page URL: The exact page they're on at that moment.

You can also have a rule targeting all visitors, without conditions. In this case, all visitors will see a specific chatbot.

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