Can I use Audiences if I’m not ready to handle customer chats?

Yes! The Drift Widget operates passively, collecting data but otherwise not interacting with site visitors, until you are ready to start taking chats.

How is Drift Audiences different from Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a powerful tool to understand site traffic, especially if you use Google Adwords. However, it serves a much different purpose than Drift Audiences. Here are some of the biggest differences:

• Google Analytics focuses almost entirely on site traffic data, and doesn’t incorporate in other data sources (firmographics, target accounts, etc) like Drift Audiences does
• Drift Audiences is focused on making it easy for you to start conversations with your site visitors by showing you high-potential pre-grouped segments of your site traffic, whereas Google Analytics is a more general analytics and reporting tool
• Drift Audiences is built as a tool that any marketer or sales leader could use to optimize their conversational marketing strategy, whereas Google Analytics has a steeper learning curve, and is ultimately an Ad spend analytics tool that can also be used for website analytics.

Why are visitor counts off compared to Google Analytics (or my other analytics app)?

The numbers should be close, but it is normal for the numbers to not be exactly the same. This can be caused by several factors:

• Make sure you’re comparing apples to apples. Drift Audiences shows unique visitors, which may be called something else in other tools
• Is the Drift Widget installed everywhere on your site? Drift Audiences can only see visitors on pages where the Drift Widget Javascript is present. If the Drift Widget isn’t installed consistently on your site, the data in Audiences will also be inconsistent
• Beware that Google Analytics (and some other tools) default to showing you estimates of your traffic based on a smaller sample of actual traffic, which can also result in different numbers than what you see in Drift Audiences.

I have my playbooks set to only fire for US visitors. How is it that visitors from other countries are seeing my playbooks and having conversations?

There are a few situations that might cause this. Basically Drift fuses together information from multiple sources, which can cause some small inconsistencies like this. Here are some examples:

• A site visitor located in the US got a playbook fire (because our geoIP lookup determined them to be in the US). However, they later entered an email address for a company headquartered in a different country, which would override the geoIP information. Audiences would then show that person as coming from a foreign country.
• A site visitor received a playbook fire in the US, but then traveled abroad, they can be sent the same playbook.

Why are the numbers of conversations and meetings different than what I see on the Drift dashboard?

There are a few important differences to note that might cause these numbers to be different:

• The dashboard defaults to a one month view of data, whereas Drift Audiences defaults to only the last 7 days. 
• The dashboard shows the actual number of conversations and meetings that happened, whereas Drift Audiences shows the number of visitors who had a conversation or booked a meeting. 
• The dashboard also includes meetings booked through email signatures and directly on reps’ drift.me profiles, whereas Audiences only includes meetings booked through chat.

Why do the numbers vary between what I see in Audiences, and what I see in the Playbooks Audience Estimator?

Drift Audiences and the Playbooks Audience Estimator operate off of the same underlying data, but there is a small difference in the timeframe being shown that can result in differences in the numbers shown. Drift Audiences shows data from the last 7 days, whereas the Playbooks Audience Estimator shows data from the previous week, Sunday to Saturday. So, for example if today is Tuesday the 14th, Playbooks Audience Estimator will show data from Sunday the 5th, to Saturday the 11th, whereas Drift Audiences will show data from Tuesday the 7th to Monday the 13th. 

Drift Audiences shows you more recent data to give you a better understanding of current site conditions, whereas Playbooks Audience Estimator just needs to show a potential estimate of playbook reach.

Why don’t the numbers in the table add up to the top-level numbers in the overview on the Audiences page?

Basically, audiences are not mutually exclusive. So if a visitor who falls into more than one audience books a meeting, for example, we will count that meeting booked in all audiences the visitor falls into. However, the top-level meetings number in the overview section will only count that meeting once.

Why are my numbers low?

The Drift widget hasn’t been installed long enough, and Drift Audiences is showing less than a full week of data, or the Drift widget isn’t installed on all pages, and is showing visitors for a subset of site traffic.

Why are pages missing?

First, check if the widget is installed consistently on all pages. If it is, it may just that the page(s) in question don’t have
enough traffic to show up in Drift Audiences. Drift Audiences only shows for pages with a significant amount of traffic.

How many custom audiences can be created?

You can create up to nine custom audiences. This is in addition to the All Visitors audience which would create a total of 10 audiences.