To drive more impact with your flows, make sure the flow is targeted to the right people, in the right place, at the right time. User targeting for your flows starts on the settings page. From there, you can define where you want your flow to display, the audience who will see it, and what happens upon the flow's completion.

This article covers:

• Intro to Flow Targeting: A quick overview video covering flow targeting.
• Flow Triggering: What should start the flow, and how often.
• Page Targeting and Dynamic URLs: The URLs and domains your content should display on.
• Audience Targeting: Who should see the flow.
• Flow Priority: Optional setting for when multiple Flows qualify to show for a user.
• Frequency Limits: Optional setting to limit how often users can see a Flow.
• Goals: How you define success for the flow. 
• Flow Completion Actions: What action should the user take after seeing the content.

This information is also available in video form in the user targeting webinar.

Intro to Flow Targeting

Flow triggering

This section defines what should start the flow, and how often it should be displayed.

Defining when to launch the flow

The first set of options configures when the flow should be displayed to a user who qualifies to see it.

Options

• When the user reaches the page (default): when a user reaches the page, Appcues will evaluate whether to show them this flow.
• When an event occurs: flow should display when a specific event is sent to Appcues, using a client-side track call or a Click to Track Event.
• Only manually: a flow will be displayed based on Permalink, Checklist, or Launchpad. 
  Note: This will override all other targeting (frequency, page, and audience).

Defining how often to display the flow

The frequency options control how often users who qualify for the flow will see it.

Options

• Show once: Once the user has seen the flow, it will not show again. This is dependent on a user seeing or completing the first step of the flow, and behavior can vary slightly depending on whether the first step is a modal, slideout, tooltip, or hotspot. For more information, be sure to check out our documentation on Groups in Appcues.
• Show every time: The flow will show every time the user qualifies for the parameters you've set in Audience Targeting - even if they have seen it already.

Page Targeting

Page targeting defines:

• what pages (URLs) in your app the flow will be triggered on.
• which environments (domains) the flow will display in (normally used for production, staging, etc.).   

Audience Targeting

The audience section defines who will see your flow.

Who should see this content?

• All users: show this flow to all users in your platform.
• Users in a segment (recommended): specifically target one of the segments in your account. We recommend segments because they allow you to create a more focused message, and you're able to get a sense of what messages are being sent to what segments.
• Specific users: Narrow your audience down by User Properties, Language, Flows, Checklists, Events and Segments. These are all available by dropdown, for example:

Flow Priority

Depending on your Flow settings (trigger, page targeting, and audience), it is possible for multiple Flows to qualify to be shown to a user. If that happens, Appcues shows only one of the qualified Flows per page-view. By default, the most recently published Flow will be shown. On the next page-view, Appcues will show the next most recently published Flow for which a user qualifies, and so on.  

Most of the time there is no need to change Flow priority since usually, only one Flow will qualify to be shown to a user at a time. However, if based on your Flow settings multiple Flows do qualify to be shown to a user, you can set a Flow weight to override a default priority and define the exact relative order a Flow will be shown to a user.  

Frequency Limits

If you click on View Flow Priority you'll see all your flow listed by priority order. This is also where you can enable the Frequency Limit option which will dictate how often your users can see Flows and NPS.

Here, you can enter a number and the corresponding period you want to create the interval. For instance, in the example below Flows and NPS will not be shown to a user if they've seen more than 1 per hour. You can use minutes, hours, days, and weeks.

Goals

The goals section is where you can measure the success of your flows, based on what users accomplished after seeing it.

Choose how to measure your success

• No Goal: will only track views and completion of a flow. 
• Choose an existing goal: saved goals will appear in a drop-down list in your flow settings. 
• Define a new goal: create a new goal to measure. When a goal is created from this screen, it will automatically be linked to the flow, and the goal results will appear on the flow's analytics page.  

Flow Completion Actions

What should we do when this Flow has completed?

• Redirect to a different page: will redirect your users to a separate URL, either inside or outside of your app
  • To redirect to a separate domain, enter the entire URL (starting with http[s]://)
  • To redirect within the same environment, enter the address after the domain (ex: if the flow is set to my.appcues.com and you'd like to redirect to the profile page, instead of my.appcues.com/profile, you can enter /profile)
• Trigger Appcues content: will launch a separate Appcues flow. You can use this feature to link multiple flows together. 
  • Any flows you link must all be published live in order to be seen together
  • If the flow you are triggering is set to appear on a different page, you can use Redirect to a different page and Trigger Appcues content together

Curious about how user properties, events, and targeting work? 

In this webinar, we'll walk you through user properties and events as well as how to target them. We'll also touch on segmenting, flow targeting, and goals within the Appcues dashboard.

Check it out below!