Understanding Audience Rules

Audience Rules allow you to define the conditions a customer must meet before they qualify to see an experience. These rules are entirely optional - but often misunderstood - and can be incredibly powerful when used correctly.

They’re part of the Rules step in the Experience Builder and live on their own tab alongside Schedule, Display, and Behaviour rules.

Audience rules must be met before Display Rules are evaluated.

How Audience Rules Work

Audience rules act like a pre-qualification filter. They check whether the customer meets certain conditions - such as coming from a specific traffic source, or having particular query parameters or cookies.

If the audience rule is met, the platform "remembers" the qualification so that the experience can be displayed later — even if the customer navigates to another page first.

This makes them ideal for scenarios where:

You want to show an experience based on how a customer arrived, even if they don’t land on the target page straight away.
You want to gate experiences behind specific behaviours or data, such as customer segments or campaign sources.

Important Behaviour of Audience Rules

Audience rules are checked on every page load and SPA navigation until they are met.
Once the customer qualifies, they are remembered as part of the audience.
If multiple experiences are active and a customer qualifies for a second experience later, that experience will take over from the first. However, if the first has already rendered (e.g. inline), it may stay visible until the page refreshes or display rules are re-evaluated (e.g. via SPA navigation).

Key Limitations to Understand

Audience rules are inclusive only – they can be used to qualify traffic, but not to disqualify it.
Qualification persists across navigation. Once a user qualifies, they are part of that audience for the duration of the session or until overridden.
Qualification depends on what's available in the data layer or browser at the time of evaluation — e.g. query parameters, cookies, or custom values.

What Types of Rules Can Be Used?

Audience Rules use the same categories and operators as Display Rules, including:

Page-level targeting (URL, path, hostname, etc.)
Query parameters
Cookies
Data layer values (e.g. product type, customer email — if integrated)
UQL (Uniqodo Query Language) for advanced setups

You can use combinations of these to define precise audience criteria.

Best Practices

Use Audience Rules to:

Capture users based on how they arrived
Ensure consistent targeting across multiple pages
Manage multi-step journeys or campaign-specific logic

Be Cautious of:

Using values that aren’t always present — e.g. if data layer values are only on certain pages, the user might never qualify unless they hit those pages first
Assuming qualification can be removed — once a user qualifies, they stay qualified for that experience