Audience
A website’s audience is the set of people who visit it over a given period. In digital marketing, it is the starting point of any analysis, because before knowing who converts, who returns or who is interested in an offer, you need to know who you are talking about. By extension, the term also covers the population a campaign or a piece of content is aimed at.
Definition and how it works
An audience is split into segments, subsets of visitors who share characteristics (traffic source, interests, pages viewed, behavior). This split serves first to understand how each group responds, then to tailor the experience to each of them.
The Jahia Academy glossary keeps the definition deliberately broad. In the context of a website, the audience is all of your visitors. It also advises against the word "user", which is ambiguous because it can mean a site visitor as well as someone working in the CMS. In Jahia jExperience, each visitor has a visitor profile fed by their events. Page views are collected by default, forms and clicks once their collection is configured. Segments, personalizations and result analysis are all built from these profiles.
Related terms: Visitor · Conversion Rate · Content management system · Event (jExperience)
Resources that cover this term
- Attract, Engage, Convert: the winning trio for digital growth
- Conversion: 3 essential steps in your Personalization Strategy
- Extranet solution: How to choose the right platform for your clients, partners, and suppliers
- Headless CMS personalization: How to deliver truly adaptive experiences
- How to build a website personalization strategy?
- How to Choose a Digital Experience Platform (DXP)?
Audience vs segment: the differences
Segment, visitor and visitor profile run from the broadest to the most specific. Mixing them up distorts any conversion rate, because the denominator changes.
| Term | How it differs |
|---|---|
| Segment | A segment is a subset of the audience defined by conditions (properties, behaviors), in other words a chosen part of the whole. |
| Visitor | In the Academy glossary’s sense, a visitor is a physical person browsing the site without being identified or logged in. The audience is the sum of these visitors. |
| Visitor profile | A profile gathers what jExperience knows about a visitor: properties, sessions and events. Taken together, these profiles describe the whole. |
Audience in practice
An A/B test on an offer page gives variant B a slight edge across all visitors. By filtering the results by segment in jExperience, the team sees that variant A still performs better for visitors coming from one specific campaign. It can then serve variant B to everyone except that segment, using a personalization.
The habit to keep is to always state the audience behind a figure. A conversion rate quoted on its own says nothing until you know whether it covers all visitors or a single segment.
Frequently asked questions
Are audience and segment the same thing in jExperience?
A segment is only part of the audience, which means all visitors to the site. It is defined in jExperience by conditions on profiles (a property, a behavior, a traffic source). Segments are used for analysis and personalization. You can read a result across all visitors and then break it down segment by segment.
Why does the Jahia glossary advise against the word "user"?
The word is ambiguous. In a web project, "user" can mean a site visitor, a person logged into a customer area or a contributor working in the CMS. The glossary keeps "visitor" for a person who is neither identified nor logged in. Speaking of visitors for the site’s public, authenticated users for logged-in areas and contributors for editorial teams avoids costly misunderstandings, especially when writing specifications.
Is a campaign’s audience the same as the site’s?
Not necessarily. In the Academy glossary’s sense, a website’s audience is all of its visitors. By extension, people also speak of the audience of a campaign or a piece of content, meaning the population it is aimed at. The two do not overlap exactly. Before comparing two figures, you therefore need to know which one they cover. In jExperience, the population a campaign targets can be expressed as a segment.