Targeting for Intercepts

You can target web or app intercepts based on a visitor’s location, device, browser, operating system, or Embedded Data. For example, you could display an intercept only to mobile users or to visitors in specific countries or cities.

Targeting accuracy

Device and browser targeting uses information from the visitor’s User-Agent string, while location targeting uses GeoIP data. These methods are approximately 85% accurate, so targeting may unintentionally exclude eligible participants.

For criteria that are essential to your research, consider asking a screener question instead. For example, ask “Where are you located?” and provide the locations you need, along with an Other option. You can then qualify or filter participants based on their direct response.

Set up targeting

Go to Studies > Publish > Targeting, then configure the locations, devices, browsers, operating systems, or Embedded Data you want to include.

If your response rate drops after enabling targeting, review your settings and remove any filters that may be excluding too many visitors.

Supported cities and countries

Start typing in the location field to search for a city or country. Ethnio includes countries and cities with populations of at least 100,000.

How User-Agent strings work

A User-Agent string is information sent by a browser that helps identify details such as the visitor’s device, browser, and rendering engine.

User-Agent strings don’t follow a consistent structure and may include inaccurate or outdated information. For example, many begin with Mozilla even when the visitor isn’t using Firefox. Some devices also identify themselves as other devices or browsers, which makes detection more difficult.

Here is an example of a User-Agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Mobile; Windows Phone 8.1; Android 4.0; ARM; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0; IEMobile/11.0; Microsoft; RM-1141) like iPhone OS 7_0_3 Mac OS X AppleWebKit/537 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile Safari/537

Because there are hundreds of thousands of device and browser combinations, User-Agent targeting should be treated as a helpful approximation rather than a guaranteed match.