Turn your ads into audiences

Each of your ads speaks to someone: an agency owner, a team on a particular email platform, someone tired of bad advice. Once RightMessage knows who, everyone who clicks that ad joins the matching segment the moment they land, so your landing page can show them the version written for them. This article covers how ads get their audiences, how you stay in control of that, and how your own segment rules fit in.

How an ad gets its audience

After every import, Righty reads each new or changed ad and places it in your segment groups: at most one segment per group, in the groups your ads actually vary on, such as business type or email platform. It decides only from what the ad tells a visitor: its copy, call to action, landing page, and URL parameters. Campaign, ad set, and ad names are your internal labels, so they're ignored.

An ad's audience is a set of segments, such as Agency in Business type and Drip in Email platform. Visitors who arrive through the ad's link join those segments. If they later arrive through a different ad, they take that ad's segments instead.

Ads that share one tracking link, such as copies of the same ad in different ad sets, look the same to a visitor, so RightMessage treats them as one ad with several copies. What you choose for one applies to all of them.

Nothing about this needs a Publish. Ad audiences are the one thing that goes live on its own: accepting or saving one updates only the ad audiences on your live site and leaves every other draft change unpublished. It also never restarts a running A/B test.

Review new ads before they go live

The New ads menu on the By ad tab of the Ads page decides what happens to Righty's picks:

A new connection starts in Review first, so your first import never changes your site before you've seen it. Switching modes publishes nothing: live audiences stay live, and waiting ones keep waiting. Reconnecting or changing the ad account keeps the mode you chose.

While picks are waiting, New ads to review appears above the numbers on the Ads page. Each ad shows its proposed segments as dashed tags.

• Accept puts that ad's audience live on your site. Accept all does it for every ad in the list.
• Reject leaves the ad without that audience. Righty won't suggest it again until the ad's copy or link changes. You can still choose segments by hand.

Choose an ad's audience yourself

1. On the By ad tab, choose the ad's row. Its details open on the right.
2. Under Audience, pick a segment in each segment group, or No segment to clear one. Groups your ads don't use yet are under Show all segment groups.
3. Choose Save and apply. The change goes live on your site as soon as you save.

A segment you choose yourself is marked Set by you and Righty never replaces it. Righty's picks are marked Picked by Righty. Hover over or focus an ad's audience tags in the table to see every segment, who picked it, and whether it's waiting for review.

If you change an ad's audience while its landing page's campaign is running an A/B test, the details note Applied while campaign's test was running, so you know the test's visitors saw a mix.

Accept suggested segments

When your ads speak to someone none of your segments describe, Righty suggests a new segment in an existing group, or a whole new segment group, under Suggested segments. Each suggestion names the landing pages and ads it would cover.

• Accept adds the segment or group to your project and maps those ads to it straight away. An ad you've set by hand in that group keeps your choice. The new segments only carry ad audiences, so nothing else on your site changes until a campaign uses them.
• Dismiss stops offering the suggestion. Nothing changes.

Ads your own rules already place: From your rules

You may already sort ad traffic yourself, with segment rules that read the link people arrive on, such as a utm_campaign value or an rm_ parameter. When your published rules put visitors from an ad's link in a segment, that ad needs no mapping in that group. It shows the segment with a neutral From your rules tag, and the Ads page counts the ad under that segment everywhere: By audience, combinations, landing page audiences, and lift. Righty leaves those groups alone, and any pick it had waiting there is dropped.

Only rules the ad's link decides count. RightMessage checks each rule as if a first-time visitor arrived on the ad's link and saw no other page. A rule that a plain visit to your home page would also meet, such as "hasn't booked in the last 30 days", is about every visitor, not the ad, so it doesn't place the ad.

This applies to segment groups where each visitor belongs to one segment. The ad's details say Your own rules already put visitors from this ad's link in that segment. If you pick a different segment there, the ad shows a rule clash.

Fix rule clashes

A clash is a mapping that disagrees with your own rules: the ad is mapped to one segment, but a rule in the same group would put visitors from its link in another. A visitor can only be in one segment of that group, so one of the two is wrong.

When you have clashes, the By ad tab says N ads clash with your segment rules. What's this? explains it, and Show lists only those ads. Clashing tags carry a warning marker, and their popover names the segment your rule picks.

To fix one, open the ad. Under its group, the details say which segment your own rules would choose. Choose Use that segment, then Save and apply. If the rule is the one that's wrong, change it in the segment group instead.

Give every ad a tracking link

RightMessage tells an ad's visitors apart by a URL parameter on its link, usually utm_content. Ads that send people to your site need a value of their own. If your account adds each ad's own ID to every visit, for example through a Meta tracking template, RightMessage notices and uses that instead, and the ad's details say Seen on visits.

The By ad table and Needs attention flag ads that can't be recognized:

Ads that link somewhere other than your site, or have no link, are grouped in one row at the bottom of By ad. They need no tracking link, and their spend is counted apart.

Next, see what the Ads page shows.