Full Guide for Creating a Segment in the Audience Designer Tool

Account Required

Building an audience segment requires an account. If you do not have an account, please visit our customer support portal for further support.

Create a New Design

Before we can begin designing our segment, we must initialize the project. This task is simple, but might have a few nuances depending on your DSP.

1. Go to the Audience tab at targeting.foursquare.com, then click Create New Design.

2. The audience designer window appears. Text in the top text fields are required before continuing:

Basis DSP: Best Practices

If you are building a segment to activate in Basis DSP, we recommend following the below naming convention for both Design Name and Targeting Code:

• BasisAdvertiserID_SegmentDetail_EndDateofCampaign
  For example, if we had an advertiser ID 123456, a segment detail called HighValueCustomers, with a campaign end date of 2/29/2024, we would name the segment 123456_HighValueCustomers_20240229.

Upon naming your design and specifying a targeting code, you're ready to begin designing your audience. You'll notice that your audience estimate is the full extent of the Foursquare targetable reach based on a broad 1+ year lookback, and no filters or criteria are applied.

This is the blank slate upon which we will generate custom-tailored segments.

3. Start designing your Audience via the 3 audience modules: Behaviors, Geography, and Demographics.

Behaviors

Behaviors is the core module of Audience. Here, we define the audience's visitation habits (whether they have been to, have not been to, or likely live near the given points of interest) and other ready-to-use audiences designed by Foursquare.

Places Visited

As mentioned above, the places visited section in the behaviors module allows you to target an audience that:

• Has been to a location
• Has not been to a location
• Lives near a location

Country

You can only target an audience from one country for your segment. Choose a country from the given list.

Lookback Window

By default, Foursquare Audience limits the lookback window to the previous month. Any user who has visited the location in the month prior to the current day will be added to the audience.

To change your lookback window, click In the past 1 month, then select a new lookback window. Select From.. to choose a start/end date on the calendar.

Location Targeting

Foursquare Audience defaults to targeting users that we detected at the location.

If instead you wish to select an audience that has been near a given location, click At Location, then switch to an In Radius selector. Enter a number and select a unit of measurement (from feet, meters, kilometers, and miles).

Add Places

There are three ways of adding places to your segment:

You can mix and match these methods of adding places while creating your segment. Search for specific places, add specific chains, and incorporate general categories into your segment.

File Upload

You may also upload your own location data to the Audience designer.

Audience's File Upload supports both point and polygon data.

Filter

After places have been added to the map, you can filter them by their Geo (location), Name, Category, or any other specification in Advanced.

Geo

The Geo section contains the following options for location filtering:

Name

Apply a filter to the name by entering text and selecting Should contain or Should not contain.

Category

Select only locations that are within the given category.
For example, if you are advertising consumer home improvement tools, you may wish to filter by Home Improvement >> Hardware Stores.

Advanced

Advanced settings allow you to filter based on more of Foursquare's data elements. You can select whether the given field should:

• Begin with/Does not begin with the text
• Contain/Does not contain the text
• Equals/Does not equal the text

Time

There are a number of options related to how your audience visits the location from a temporal perspective, including:

• Frequency, or the visitation rate
• Days of the Week
• Time of Day

These tools are only available for locations added from the Audience Designer. They are not available from file uploads.

Frequency is determined by evaluating the overall visitation to the location.

• High frequency are those that visit most frequently, such as employees or loyalists.
• Medium frequency are those who visit the location often.
• Low frequency are those that only occasionally visit the location.

Ready-to-use Audiences

Ready-to-use audiences are hand-curated, based on real-world behavior patterns. To design these, our models account for an audience's consumer lifestyle, visitation to chains, place categories, and more.

Please note that ready-to-use segments are created at the country level and cannot be customized for specific geographic regions. The default setting is the U.S., but it can be changed to a select number of other countries.

Geography

The geography selector allows you to apply another level of location selection to your audience segment.

While you can and should define your audience's location targeting in the Behaviors section, you can add another layer of context.

For example, your audience may have been defined as having an interest in Florida theme parks, via visitation targeting and ready-to-use audiences. In the Geography section, we can now refine that audience further, choosing to include only those who live in certain states.

Demographics

The Demographics module allows you to select/exclude demographic options, where available. Including gender, age range, and if they are a parent.

For example, if your segment audience is for luxury female fashion, you may wish to select the appropriate age range and income for the target audience.

Audience Estimate & Settings

As you update your Audience via the aforementioned modules, your Audience Estimate progressively changes with an estimate of devices.

Reach Multiplier

Enable Reach Multiplier to expand your audience, increasing the scale by adding similar devices. These devices are modeled from the audience you created.

Apply Logic (And/Or)

You can apply simple logic statements to your Audience via dragging and dropping items on top of each other. When you drop an item on top of another item, the two are combined in an AND... OR statement.

Edit

To edit an item, simply click to open the configuration menu. Upon completing your edits, click Update to apply your changes to the audience.

Duplicate

If you wish to make a copy/duplicate an item, click the three dots (⋮) beside the item you wish to duplicate, then click Duplicate.

Delete

If you made a mistake, click the three dots (⋮) beside the item you wish to delete, then click Delete.

Save

Click Save to store your progress on your Foursquare account.

Build

When you're finished designing your segment, you can click Build to be redirected to the My Designs page. Here, you can fill in the final details to build your segment.