Key Concepts

• Audience Targeting is the ability to describe a section of your entire user base. This is most often done by referring to Player Segments.
• A Player Segment (or just Segment) represents the subset of players who fulfil some criterion, see Implementing Player Segments for details.

Overview

When sending Broadcast Messages or Push Notification Campaigns or conducting Experiments these features will, by default, target every player in your player base. Oftentimes, the desired behaviour is to send a message to only a specific section of players. For instance, you may want to inform players about an important game feature, but you may not want to bother players who have already accessed this feature. This is where Audience Targeting and Player Segments come in.

INFO

Good to know: Audience Targeting is currently available for Broadcast Messages, Push Notification Campaigns and Experiments. To find out more about these features see Managing Broadcasts, Managing Push Notifications and Working with Experiments.

Using Audience Targeting

Using Audience Targeting, messages can either be sent out to the whole player base or they can be targeted to a smaller audience by Player Segments or by a list of player IDs. A small note at the bottom of the targeting dialog will always tell you just how many players you are targeting.

Targeting the Entire Player Base

By default, audience targeting will be turned off and you will be targeting your entire player base:

Toggle the switch to enable targeting.

Enabling Audience Targeting

Once targeting is enabled, you will be able to specify Segments or Player IDs as targets:

Targeting is enabled, but we've not set any targets yet.

Adding Segments

Currently configured Player Segments, in addition to their size estimates, are shown in the Select Player Segments dropdown menu. Clicking on an item will add it to the targeted segment(s). When multiple segments are selected, the broadcast will be delivered to players in any one of these segments. Where a player belongs to multiple applicable segments the message will still only be delivered to them once.

Here we are matching players who are members of Low Gold or Low Gems segments. This also includes players who are members of both segments.

It is also possible to only match player who match all listed segments. You can do this by changing the toggle to the left of the list of selected segments.

Now we are only matching players who are members of both Low Gold and Low Gems segments.

Whether a player belongs to a target segment or not is periodically evaluated while the player is logged in, so it's possible for a player to become eligible for receiving a Broadcast in the middle of a session.

INFO

Heads-up: The LiveOps Dashboard uses the current sampling-based segment size estimates for giving an idea of how large the target audience might be. This is a very rough approximation both since it relies on sampled data but also because of the segment population sizes changing over time.

Adding Individual Players

Individual players are targeted by typing (or pasting) a list of comma-separated player IDs of the form Player:XXXXXXXXXX into the Select Individual Players text field.

Targeting individual players in this way can be useful when you have identified a group of players through means other than that they belong to the same segment. For instance, you may have identified a number of users who have been suffering with a bug in your game and you have been able to pull the IDs of the affected players from your logs. You can reach out to these players by sending a messages that is targeted directly to their player IDs.

INFO

Good to know: The list is validated by the input form when clicking "Validate Players". Any non-existing or malformed entries in the list are reported and left out of the audience specification.