Manage ahead's targeting

You can utilize ahead's targeting capabilities to make sure that your workforce gets to see what is relevant to them. This article tells you about AD-based target audiences, the main property and advanced targeting

Why Target Audiences?

Often a News post is not important for everyone. By setting a target audience, you can reach certain people about relevant news, and thus reduce the information overload. With this feature, we provide a tool that considers the information needs of each employee.

How can I create target audiences?

As an admin, you will find a tab called Target audience in the Company Settings. There you can search for existing groups in the Active Directory and add them as target audiences in ahead.

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How can I manage target audiences?

Audience members are managed in the Active Directory. Only the ‘display name’ in ahead can be changed.

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How can I use target audiences?

Target audiences are available to all editors when writing News and Pages. Members of those groups will receive a notification in ahead that this News post has just been published.‍ Targeting can also be applied to the navigation structure of ahead. 

You can set up your own saved audiences for quick reuse. Setting up an audience is done through "Create an audience".

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The "Main Property" and its importance for targeting

On the target audiences tab you will also find the ability to set a main property:

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The main property selector allows to activate one of the listed properties to be the deciding factor for selecting targeted designs as well as targeted quicklinks / applications. The shown properties are all default Azure AD properties of users. This means that when "officeLocation" is selected, the user's AD property officeLocation's value will be used to determine certain targeting aspects of ahead like targeted designs, and quicklinks.

Targeted Designs

Once a main property is active, you can start creating targeted designs, by adding designs and associating with them concrete property values. Those values are extracted from your Azure AD and are a daily snapshot of the values currently in use across your ahead userbase for the selected AD property.

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You can learn more about defining targeted designs in the article about changing the ahead design.

Advanced Targeting

This premium feature lets you target your workforce based on user properties when publishing a news. We sync the user properties you would like to use for advanced targeting to ahead. Then your editors can create news and specify who should be targeted based on these properties and their values. For example, editors can target a news to all users with the 'city' property set to 'Berne'.

🎓 Learn more about Advanced Targeting