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Who can use this feature?
- Part of Guides and Surveys, an add-on for Business, Advanced, and Enterprise plans.
- Requires an Admin, Architect, or Standard role to configure.
Guides and Surveys is in active development. Product functionality and documentation may change without notice.
Guides and Surveys lets you target content to end users based on Fullstory segments. Instead of rebuilding audience definitions inside Guides and Surveys, you can reuse a segment you've already defined in Fullstory and target a guide, survey, banner, or checklist directly against it.
This works best for historical or attribute-based cohorts—for example, suppressing a survey for users who recently saw it, or targeting an onboarding campaign by days since registration (see When to use Fullstory segment targeting). Fullstory segment membership is not evaluated in realtime: it refreshes periodically rather than in the current session (see Segment timing and freshness). If you need to react to same-session behavior, such as a pages visited during the current visit, use a Tag value or User properties condition instead.
In this article:
- How to target using a Fullstory segment
- When to use Fullstory segment targeting
- Segment timing and freshness
- Fullstory segments vs. Guides and Surveys user segments
- Frequently Asked Questions
How to target using a Fullstory segment
A Fullstory segment condition is available alongside the other audience conditions for any guide, survey, banner, or checklist.
- Open the Settings for your guide, survey, banner, or checklist.
- In the Page & Audience Targeting section, click Only certain pages and user segments.
- Under the "...of the following conditions match" area, change the condition to Fullstory Segment.
- Select the Fullstory segment you want to target from the list. Guides and Surveys lists the segments defined in your Fullstory org.
When to use Fullstory segment targeting
Fullstory segment targeting is most useful when you want to reuse an audience definition you've already built in Fullstory instead of maintaining the same logic separately in Guides and Surveys. It works well for historical or attribute-based cohorts, such as:
- Showing a survey only to active, paying users who haven't seen the same survey in the last 30 days.
- Targeting an onboarding campaign to new users based on days since registration.
- Triggering a quarterly NPS survey to everyone who belongs to a specific segment.
- Sending a reminder to users who started a checklist but haven't finished it within a set number of days.
Note: Fullstory segment membership is not evaluated in realtime—see Segment timing and freshness below. For same-session reactions, such as targeting a user who visited three pages in the current session, use a Tag value or User properties condition set through in-session Fullstory user properties instead. You can also trigger off rage clicks as a custom event.
Segment timing and freshness
Fullstory segment definitions become available to Guides and Surveys as soon as you create or update them in Fullstory. Segment membership—the list of users who currently match a segment—works differently:
- Membership refreshes every 4 hours, on the hour, outside a daily suppression window—a scheduled period during each region's peak business hours when segment refreshes pause, to avoid adding processing load to Fullstory at the times customers and their end users rely on it most. As of this writing, the suppression windows are 10 AM–4 PM EDT for North America and 7 AM–3 PM UTC for Europe.
- Refreshes are timed around the window's edges. The last refresh before the window runs 1 hour before it starts (for example, 9 AM EDT ahead of the NA window), and the next refresh runs at the end of the window (for example, 4 PM EDT). Refreshes then resume every 4 hours until the next suppression window.
- New Fullstory Segment conditions take effect at the next scheduled refresh, not immediately. Note that the timing of when you add the condition, not when you publish, determines which refresh applies once the content goes live.
- Saving the condition—not publishing—starts syncing. A guide, survey, banner, or checklist becomes a candidate for segment membership syncing as soon as you save its Settings with a Fullstory Segment condition, even while it's still a draft. Because syncing is tied to when the condition is saved rather than when the content is published, matching users can be synced by any refresh that runs before you publish, so they may be eligible to see the content the moment it goes live.
- Private segments aren't available for targeting. Only non-private Fullstory segments sync to Guides and Surveys.
Note: Because membership only updates at scheduled refreshes, a user who enters and then exits a segment entirely between two refreshes (including during a suppression window) will never see content targeted to that segment. For example, if a guide is drafted and published at 10:38 AM during the suppression window, no user sees it until the refresh at the end of the window, regardless of when during the window they visit.
Note: Fullstory segment targeting is not realtime or in-session. If your use case depends on reacting to behavior within the current session, use Fullstory user properties or tags instead.
For worked examples that walk through how publish timing, suppression windows, and segment membership interact, see What's an example of how refresh timing affects a specific publish? and What if a user matches a segment but exits it again before the next refresh? in the Frequently Asked Questions section.
Fullstory segments vs. Guides and Surveys user segments
Fullstory segments are distinct from Guides and Surveys user segments, even though both are used to group and target users.
- Fullstory segments: defined in Fullstory using session and analytics data, and reused in Guides and Surveys through the Segment condition described in this article.
- Guides and Surveys user segments: defined directly in Guides and Surveys from tag and user property conditions, and managed under Users > Segments.
If you already maintain a Fullstory segment that captures the audience you need, target it directly rather than recreating the same logic as a Guides and Surveys user segment.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens if Fullstory can't evaluate a user's segment membership?
If Fullstory is unable to determine whether a user currently belongs to a targeted segment, the Fullstory Segment condition resolves to "not a match," and the content won't show for that user.
Can I target a private Fullstory segment?
No. Private segments aren't shared with Guides and Surveys. To target a segment, make sure it isn't marked private in Fullstory.
Why isn't Fullstory segment targeting realtime?
Evaluating segment membership requires querying Fullstory's analytics data for every active user, which isn't feasible to do in realtime at scale. Instead, Guides and Surveys periodically recomputes segment membership—by default at least every 4 hours—which covers most targeting use cases while keeping the underlying system efficient. For use cases that need to react within the current session, use Fullstory user properties or tags instead.
How does publish timing affect when targeted content appears?
If you add a Fullstory Segment condition after the most recent refresh, matching users won't see the content until the next scheduled refresh outside a suppression window—even if they already belong to the segment. Content published during a suppression window won't reach targeted users until the refresh at the end of that window.
Does a draft start syncing before I publish it?
Yes. Syncing is tied to when a Fullstory Segment condition is saved, not to when the content is published. As soon as you save a guide, survey, banner, or checklist's Settings with a Fullstory Segment condition, it becomes a candidate for membership syncing—even while it's still a draft. If you save the condition now and publish later, matching users may already have been synced by a refresh that ran in the interim, so they can be eligible to see the content as soon as it goes live.
Can a user match a segment but never see the targeted content?
Yes. If a user enters and exits a segment entirely within the gap between two scheduled refreshes—including during a suppression window—no refresh captures that membership change, so the user never sees the targeted content.
What's an example of how refresh timing affects a specific publish?
Using the NA suppression window above (10 AM–4 PM EDT) as an example, suppose a guide with a Fullstory Segment condition is published at 8:30 AM, before that day's last pre-window refresh at 9 AM:
- A user who visits at 8:45 AM, before any refresh since publish, doesn't see the guide.
- A user who visits at 9:30 AM, after the 9 AM refresh, sees the guide.
- A user who visits at 11:57 AM, during the suppression window, still sees the guide, since their membership carried over from the 9 AM refresh.
- A user who visits at 4:29 PM, after the refresh that runs at the end of the window, sees the guide.
Only the first user, who visited before any refresh ran, misses the guide—every visit after either refresh sees the content.
What if a user matches a segment but exits it again before the next refresh?
Suppose the same guide is published at 9:32 AM, just after the 9 AM refresh. In this scenario, a user can match the segment and still never see the content, if they exit the segment before the next refresh runs:
- A user visits at 11:57 AM. Because no refresh has run since publish, they don't see the guide yet, even though they already match the segment.
- That user exits the segment at 2:13 PM, still inside the suppression window.
- The user visits again at 4:28 PM, right after the refresh that runs at the end of the window—but since they already exited the segment, they still don't see the guide.
Because no refresh occurred while the user matched the segment, they never became eligible to see the content.