#Native Engagement Segmentation

As we only scratched the surface of what Access can do to help you increase your visitors' engagement, we will now discover how we can use these various engagement levels to display particular messages & widgets to different groups of visitors.

#Understand native groups

All visitors are not, and should not be considered, the same. Some visitors will only visit a few pages of your site while some of them will stay for hours, register to newsletters & even create free accounts. To handle these behavioral differences, we created 4 native engagement groups, going from the least engaged ones called volatiles, to occasionals, regulars, and the most engaged ones called fans.

We currently use two different modes to segment visitors into these engagement groups: RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value — replaced here with the amount of pages visited per session) and F (for Frequency only).

  • RFM: This mode is based on a well-known marketing method used to analyze customer value. Once the recency (the age of the previously most recent visit), the frequency (the average amount of sessions made per day in the last xx days) and the monetary value (the average amount of pages per session made during the same period) have been correctly passed through a complex analysis process, we obtain an engagement score going from 0 to 100 that we can then use to separate visitors based on their engagement. In your Dashboard, you can customize the number of days defining an engagement period, however the definition of the engagement groups cannot: they change through time and ponderate themselves dynamically.
  • F: This mode is simply and only based on the frequency parameter of RFM, which gives you the right and duty to specify in your Dashboard your own definition of the native groups based on a simple question: how much sessions does a volatile/occasional/regular/fan visitor do in xx days?

#Change your integration

Native segmentation may or may not be your priority, that's for you to decide. However, the sole purpose of the Access.js script is to display paywalls. That's where Audit.js comes to the rescue: it will allow you to track more interactions with your site like sessions, visits, that are not in the scope of Access.js.
Hopefully, adding Audit.js to your site is only a few lines of code:
In this particular example, Audit.js will send a page-view event to your dashboard. Access.js will automatically detect the Audit.js script and wait for the page-view event to be done before going further with displaying the paywall. This is done to ensure Audit.js and Access.js base their actions against the same cookie/visitor. In order to avoid waiting for Audit.js and display the paywall directly, please see Access.js skip_audit_loader configuration option.

And that's really all you have to do inside the code to be able to use native segmentation!

#Watch the results and adapt accordingly

Dividing visitors into engagement groups is a complex cycle spread over multiple days for which the results will be progressively observable. Once the first cycle of days is over, you will be able to get precise conclusions from your observations.

Based on these observations, change the design, the messages or the actions of your different scenarios to maximize engagement with the different native groups.

#Bravo-Six, going Custom!

Another important part of segmentation is to be able to break the rules and do it your own way. That's where custom groups become essential.

Custom groups are a completely separate entity from native groups and will take precedence over the later. This means that if you setup a custom group and use it inside your code, it will be used and will totally disable native groups for a particular visitor. This comes in handy when you have your own process to determine engagement groups.

In order to use a custom group, you have to specify its slug (previously created in your Dashboard) inside your code:
A custom group is attached to a visitor as long as it is set in the code, that it hasn't changed, it still exists and that the scenario duration is not over.

This concludes our guide regarding native and custom segmentation. You're more than ready to test a lot of different strategies 📈 If one of them is to use forms as a way to better monetize your visitors, the next guide might be your thing!