Define the Audience

Learn how to add inclusion criteria to target specific users in rules and segments.

The audience is the set of users or other units that are eligible for a rule or segment.

The Inclusion criteria section offers four ways to define your audience:

• Add attribute: Target users based on evaluation context fields like country, platform, or version.
• Add segment: Target users who belong to a pre-defined segment.
• Add holdback: Include or exclude a random subset of users defined by a holdback on a surface.
• Add group: Combine multiple criteria into a logical group with AND or OR operators.

Add an Attribute Criterion

1. Go to where you want to add the criterion in Confidence

   This can be in an already created A/B test, rollout, segment, or rule.

2. Click + Add attribute

   Click + Add attribute in the Inclusion criteria section.

3. Type in the name of the criterion, and select its type
4. Select the appropriate operator

   Click it to unfold the dropdown list.

If Confidence has seen the field before, it autocompletes and the type populates automatically. The operators available to choose from is dependent on the type of the field. For example, if the field is a string, the operator is one of: is (equals), is not (not equals), in (one of many) or not in (not one of many).

The in operator behaves differently depending on how the context value is typed:

• String: in checks whether the entire string equals one of the listed values. It does not do substring matching. For example, if fruit is the string "Apple, Banana, Cherry", then fruit in ["Banana"] will not match, because the full string does not equal "Banana".
• List of strings: in checks whether any element in the list matches one of the listed values. If fruit is the list ["Apple", "Banana", "Cherry"], then fruit in ["Banana"] will match.

If you need to target users based on a comma-separated string, consider changing the context field to send a list of strings instead. Confidence does not support substring matching on strings.

Add a Segment Criterion

Use a segment criterion to target users who belong to a pre-defined segment. This lets you reuse the same audience definition across multiple experiments, rollouts, and rules.

1. Go to where you want to add the criterion in Confidence

   This can be in an already created A/B test, rollout, segment, or rule.

2. Click + Add segment

   Click + Add segment in the Inclusion criteria section.

3. Select the segment

   Choose a segment from the dropdown list.

Create segments in the Segments section of the left sidebar. Learn more in the Create Segments guide.

Add a Holdback Criterion

Use a holdback criterion to include or exclude a random subset of users defined by a holdback. Holdbacks are configured on surfaces and represent a stable random subset of users that you can reuse over time.

1. Go to where you want to add the criterion in Confidence

   This can be in an already created A/B test, rollout, segment, or rule.

2. Click + Add holdback

   Click + Add holdback in the Inclusion criteria section.

3. Select a holdback

   Choose a holdback from the dropdown list. Only holdbacks from surfaces associated with your experiment are available.

Holdbacks are defined on surfaces. To create a new holdback, go to the surface’s settings page. Learn more about holdbacks in the surface settings documentation.

Add a Group

Use groups to combine multiple criteria with AND or OR operators. Groups let you build complex targeting logic beyond individual attribute criteria.

1. Go to where you want to add the criterion in Confidence

   This can be in an already created A/B test, rollout, segment, or rule.

2. Click + Add group

   Click + Add group in the Inclusion criteria section.

3. Select the logical operator

   Choose AND or OR to control how criteria within the group combine.

4. Add criteria to the group

   Add attributes, segments, or holdbacks within the group.

You can nest groups to create arbitrarily complex targeting logic. For example, you can target users in Sweden AND (on iOS OR Android).

Related Resources

Audience Reference

Deep dive into targeting and allocation

Create Segments

Define reusable user groups

Context Schema

Configure available targeting attributes

Surface Settings

Configure holdbacks and exclusivity groups

Target with Criteria API

API reference for targeting