How to use Beacon events to create segments

Overview

Beacon general tracking and specific events provide valuable data that help create segments for highly targeted content. Read on to learn how to create segments using general tracking and specific event data.

In this guide

• Create segments based on Beacon general tracking
• Create segments based on specific tracking

Create segments based on Beacon general tracking

General Beacon tracking allows you to create segments based on contacts' site browsing using a target page's URL slug. A URL slug is its unique identifier, and you'll usually find it at the end of the URL. Let's look at an example using Sendlane's website:

• www.sendlane.com - This URL has no slug because this is the root URL
• www.sendlane.com/resources - This URL's slug is resources and indicates that this URL should point to the Resources page rather than the home page
• www.sendlane.com/resources/blog - This slug is resources/blog and indicates that this URL should point to the Blog page, which is a sub-page of the Resources page (which has other sub-pages like ebooks and podcasts).
• www.sendlane.com/resources/blog/a-very-specific-article - This URL's slug is resources/blog/a-very-specific-article and indicates that this URL should point to a specific article, which is stored in the Blog page

If we wanted to create segments of contacts who have visited these pages, we'd enter the slug of my target page in our segment's conditions.

Let's set up a segment for contacts who have visited the blog page to see how many contacts are interested in our company's blog.

It's not as broad as the resources page, which won't tell us anything about contacts who are specifically interested in the blog, and is a little more open than one article's slug, which is too narrow to tell us anything about contacts who are interested in the blog as a whole.

To create this segment:

1. Create a segment
2. In the first condition dropdown (defaults to Email Address), select Engagement & Activity
3. Select Visited Site
4. Change the default Is to Contains
5. Enter your slug text in the input value field (resources/blog in our example)
6. Change the default Equals to Greater Than
7. Enter a number of times you'd like contacts to have visited the page to be included in the segment (we'll select 2 so that contacts will have to have visited the blog page 3 or more times to be included)
8. Click Save

Once the segment finishes processing, we have a collection of contacts who we can be pretty sure are interested in our blog. 

We can use this segment as the send to audience in our campaigns about new blog posts to ensure contacts who love our blog are the first to hear about new additions.

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Create segments based on specific tracking

You can use specific Beacon events to create segments for contacts who have triggered them.

To create a segment based on a specific Beacon event:

1. Create a segment
2. In the first condition dropdown (defaults to Email Address), select Engagement & Activity
3. Select Triggered Event
4. Select your event from the dropdown
5. Click Save

Once the segment finishes processing, you'll have a collection of contacts who have triggered your specified event.

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