Feature Release: Audience Splits

Overview

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Hightouch Audience Splits. As part of the family of features within Hightouch Audiences, Splits unlocks seamless management of A/B and multivariate testing by providing users with randomized audiencing capabilities. Now, using Hightouch, marketers can easily create the complex audiences needed to perform cross-channel multivariate testing to ensure that they optimize their marketing efforts across every channel.

While individual platforms like Facebook or Salesforce CRM allow for multivariate testing within their specific channel(s), marketers today lack the ability to easily create randomized audiences that sync across their many marketing tools. Sure, you can manually download an audience list and split it out further with RANDOM() formulas in excel before then reuploading multiple CSVs to each individual platform…. But that takes time that modern marketers just don’t have.

Using Hightouch, you simply create your desired audience with our no-code audience builder (using the data directly in your data warehouse). Then, you simply input the amount of splits you would like within your audience, along with the % of users to be allocated to each. From there, Hightouch takes away the hassle of splitting lists and returns to you exactly what you wanted - randomized groups of users to sync out to any of your marketing tools.

Advanced features like stratification variables provide an additional layer of granularity to ensure that audiences are distributed as desired. With Stratified sampling, you are able to select certain customer attributes like age to distribute evenly across your various splits.

Alright, enough chit-chat - let's dive in to see how this works in the real world.

Audience Splits Use-Case:

Let’s say you want to supplement retargeting efforts in Facebook with an email campaign from your email platform - in this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You want to understand the lift of adding the email campaign to your Facebook campaign, as well as the lift of adding personalization in the email itself. Rather than looking at each channel independently, you want to measure success off of both channels and look at the lift on purchases driven across each group.

To do so, you know you’ll need three random splits created within your retargeting audience:

1. Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE NOT sent an email
2. Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE sent an email WITHOUT personalization
3. Users who ARE targeted on Facebook and ARE sent an email WITH personalization

You navigate into Hightouch and create your retargeting audience with the following logic:

You then navigate to the Splits tab within the audience to toggle on Splits:

You create three splits with the following distribution:

You sync your audience to Facebook and turn on your retargeting campaign.

You then sync the same audience to Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), making sure to add the split group as an included field in your audience syncs. Doing so ensures that once in SFMC, you can segment the campaign to target each specific split group of the test.

Pro Tip: With the audience and campaigns now running, you can leverage sync logs, to ensure that the data identifying which users belong in each split is readily available in your data warehouse. This provides your team with the ability to quickly and easily look at purchases driven across the three audience splits to measure the success of your campaign using any BI tool you have in place.

Thanks to Hightouch, managing complex multivariate testing across channels has never been easier.

Get Started

Audience Splits is generally available for all existing Audiences customers. Don’t have Hightouch Audiences enabled? Request a demo here. If you’re not a Hightouch customer yet, you can sign up for a free account, or book a demo.

Have any feedback or ideas for features you’d like to see available in Hightouch Audiences? Reach out to alec@hightouch.com and share them! The team is excited for the continued development of Audiences to ensure we remain the best audience management solution available on the market.