Help · Audience

Narrowing by property

A condition like Anyone who Ordered Product at least 1 time asks whether something happened. Often what you mean is narrower: which product, which page, which order.

Under every Did something and Spent money condition there is a small Narrow by property button. It adds a line under the sentence — where the product is “Brightening Concealer” — and the count beside the rule moves as soon as you finish the line.

Narrowing is always optional. A condition with no narrowing means exactly what it meant before this existed.

What you can narrow by

The properties offered are the ones your store's own events actually carry, so the menu can never suggest something that is not there. An Ordered Product event carries the product, its code, the quantity and the price; a page view carries the page. If an event carries nothing worth narrowing by, the button says so instead of opening an empty menu.

This covers events from every source alike — what Shopify records, what happens on your storefront, and what an integration sends in through the events API. If your loyalty app records a tier on every event it sends, that tier is in this menu. The one exception is a metric you have removed yourself: nothing it carried is suggested, because the metric no longer counts anywhere.

The menu reads recent events rather than every event you have ever recorded, so a value that turns up once in a million rows may not be listed. You can always type it — a typed value counts exactly the same as a chosen one.

If you know a property by a name that is not in the menu — history imported from another tool often has its own — choose Something else… and type it.

You can put up to five narrowing lines on one condition, and they all have to hold of the same event. Ordered Product where the product is the concealer and the quantity is 2 is one purchase of two concealers, not one purchase and a separate order of two of something. Stacked lines carry an AND between them on screen to say so — it is the same AND that sits between groups of conditions, and it is never an "either".

Choosing products

You never type a product identifier. Press Choose products and search your own catalog by name or by product code. When a product code is the reason a row matched, the row shows the code, so you can tell a right answer from a near miss.

What gets stored is the product itself, not the words you searched with. Rename it in Shopify and the rule keeps working — the sentence simply reads back the new name.

One condition can name several products. Pick a second and the line changes from the product is “Brightening Concealer” to the product is any of “Brightening Concealer” or “Everyday Lip Balm” on its own; you never choose between "one product" and "a list". One line holds up to 25 products.

If a product is later deleted from your catalog, the sentence says a deleted product rather than showing you a number you would have no way to read.

Choosing pages

Pages work the same way, from the pages your visitors have actually reached — there is nothing to type and no way to name a page that was never visited.

Tracking parameters are ignored. Everything after the ? is dropped before a page is listed, so one page is one entry however many campaigns, ad platforms and share links pointed at it. The trade is worth knowing: two addresses that differ only after the ? are the same page here.

"Never bought it" and "bought something else" are different rules

This is the one place where two rules that read alike catch different people, and it is worth reading twice.

Never bought the Ruby Lip Gloss. Set the condition to exactly 0 times and narrow it to that product. It catches everyone with no purchase of the lip gloss — including everyone who has never bought anything at all. For a store with a lot of browsers, most of the people it catches have never bought from you.

Bought something that isn't the Ruby Lip Gloss. Set the condition to at least 1 time and narrow it with is not the lip gloss. This one requires a real purchase of something else, so people who never bought anything are not in it.

Which you want depends on the email. If you are keeping an offer away from people who already own the thing, the first is what you mean. If you are writing to buyers about a product they have not tried yet, the second is.

At most hides the same shape. At most 1 time includes everyone who bought it zero times, because zero is at most one — so that rule also reaches people who have never bought anything.

What the comparisons mean

• is and is not — the value, or any one of several values.
• contains — a text match against the value as it is stored. If the property holds a list of things, this matches the list written out as text, so contains "sal" finds a list containing "sale" — and would also find "salt".
• is at least, is at most and is between — a number comparison. These are the three below.
• has a value and has no value — whether the event recorded anything at all for that property. A property recorded as nothing counts as no value, the same as one that was never recorded.

Pick the comparison first. Every comparison is there from the moment the line appears, and choosing one decides what it asks you for next: is, is not and contains open a value control, the three number comparisons open a field for a number, and has a value and has no value need nothing further and so offer nothing further.

A blank is not something you can ask for. A comparison against nothing at all would match every event that recorded anything for that property, which is never what anyone means, so the field does not accept an empty value.

Comparing numbers

Ordered Product where the price is at least 20. Where the quantity is between 2 and 5. Three comparisons do this:

• is at least — that number or higher.
• is at most — that number or lower.
• is between — inside the two numbers you give, and both ends count. Between 2.00 and 19.00 includes a price of exactly 2.00 and a price of exactly 19.00.

These three read the property as a number. Every other comparison reads it as text, and the two do not agree about what is bigger. As text, "9" comes after "10", the way words come in alphabetical order; as numbers, 9 comes before 10. That is why the rule beside the builder says where the price as a number is at least 20 — so you can always tell which kind of comparison you are looking at.

Type digits, nothing else. 20, 19.99, -5. A currency symbol, a comma between the thousands, a percent sign or a stray space is not a number, and the line will say so before you save rather than after. Write 1000, not $1,000.

Events that recorded something other than a number are simply not matched. If one of your orders recorded the price as "call for pricing", price is at most 20 does not catch it and neither does price is at least 20 — a comparison it cannot make is not a comparison it answers. The same is true of an event that recorded no price at all, exactly as it is for is not.

These rules read every matching event. Narrowing by a number is not a shortcut and it does not get faster on a bigger store; it is the same work as is not and contains. On a large history it may take a moment for the count beside your rule to settle, and the builder says so while it does.

A line you have not finished yet

A new line arrives as where the product is … with the value still to say, and that is a perfectly normal place to be for a few seconds. Nothing pretends otherwise while you are there:

• The line says it needs a value — or, on a number comparison, that it needs a number, or that the highest number you gave is smaller than the lowest. Which one it says is which thing to change.
• The count holds at the last number it was sure of, and says why, rather than showing you a number for a rule you have not finished.
• Saving asks you to finish the line or remove it. Nothing is lost — the rest of the rule is exactly as you left it.

How far back these rules see

Purchases and page views only started carrying this detail when this feature arrived. A rule that narrows by product or by page therefore reaches back to that day and no further for now, and the builder says so on screen wherever the caveat applies.

A catch-up over your older orders and page views is a separate piece of work. When it runs, the same rules reach further back on their own — there is nothing for you to change and no rule to rebuild.

The new Ordered Product metric

Answering who bought this product needs an event about a product, and Placed Order is an event about an order — one event however many things were in the basket.

So your store now records Ordered Product as well: one for each product on an order, carrying that product, its code, its quantity and what that line actually cost after its own discount. Placed Order is unchanged and still records everything it did before.

You will see Ordered Product appear in Metrics and on profiles' activity, listed under your store like every other event Shopify sends. That is expected — it is the event product rules are built on — not a sign that anything went wrong. A three-product order now shows one Placed Order and three Ordered Product.

One honest note about money. Spent money on Ordered Product adds up what the products cost, after each line's own discount. It leaves out shipping and any discount applied to the whole order, because those belong to the order and not to a product. It is the right number for who spends the most on this product and the wrong number for accounting.

Where else you'll see it

The rule on a segment's own page reads back the same sentence the builder showed you, with the products named as they are called today. Talaria can write these rules too — say people who bought the Ruby Lip Gloss twice this year and it names the product for you, or tells you it could not find it rather than guessing. The Describe your segment page covers that.