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Audiences

Audiences are the push notification and banner counterpart to email contacts. An audience is a group of website visitors who have opted in to receive push notifications or banner content from your site.

Audiences are not the same as contacts. They share the Mailtarget CDP surface but live in a separate data store with separate consent.

Visitor vs Audience​

Two terms that collide on the audience dashboard:

  • Visitor. A website session tracked through your Mailtarget tracker script. Visitors can receive banner content. They have not opted in to push notifications.
  • Audience. A visitor who has opted in to push notifications. Audiences can receive push sends in addition to banners.

The numerical relationship: every Audience is also a Visitor; not every Visitor is an Audience. If your dashboard shows 7 Visitors and 5 Audiences, the 5 Audiences are a subset of the 7 Visitors.

When you create a Push Campaign, it reaches the 5 Audiences. When you create a Banner Campaign, it reaches the 7 Visitors (which includes the 5 Audiences).

Why audiences are separate from contacts​

Three reasons:

  1. Consent surface differs. Push opt-in happens through the browser permission prompt; email opt-in happens through a form or confirmation link. The legal bases are different.
  2. Identity is anonymous. A visitor has no email address. A push token identifies a browser, not a person. The same person across two browsers is two audiences.
  3. Channel is different. A push notification is delivered by the browser vendor. An email is delivered by Mailtarget's MTA. The infrastructure path is unrelated.

Some teams reconcile audiences and contacts when the same person opts in to both channels (push prompt plus email signup). The link is your application's responsibility; Mailtarget does not auto-merge anonymous push tokens with named contacts.

Audience Manager​

Audience Manager is the surface for creating segmented audience lists. It supports two collection methods:

  • Website. Collect audiences from specific URLs on your site. Two filter modes:
    • Equal. Capture only visitors on the exact URL match.
    • Contain. Capture visitors on the URL and any sub-path.
    • Not Contain. Capture visitors who never visit the named URL.
  • Behavior. Reserved for future expansion (per the legacy documentation). Not active at this time.

Each audience list can carry an Advance Segment for further filtering by country, city, browser, and operating system. Advance Segment is all-or-nothing: if you use any of those filters, you must set values for all of them.

The country and city filters are populated only from the geographies that have already produced visitors on your site. You cannot pre-select a country that has not yet generated traffic.

Push Campaigns and Segmented Audience​

When you create a Push Campaign, the recipient selector offers two scopes:

  • All Audience. Every push opt-in across the account.
  • Segmented Audience. A specific audience list defined in Audience Manager.

For repeat or targeted push sends, use Segmented Audience. The segmented list is the campaign equivalent of a contact segment.

ChannelReachOpt-in surfaceUse when
BannerAll VisitorsImplicit (visit your site)You want to surface a message to anyone on the site.
PushAudience subsetExplicit (browser permission prompt)You want to reach the visitor outside your site.

Both channels are part of the same Mailtarget account. Visitor and Audience counts are visible in the same dashboard.

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