Creating Segments

Segments are dynamic audience definitions built from criteria. An Individual segment filters people by their attributes, their behavior, and the content they have interacted with. An Account segment filters organizations by their attributes and by the behavior of the individuals who belong to them.

Once you connect Liferay DXP to your LDP workspace, the segments you create appear in Liferay DXP as Liferay Data Platform segments (Analytics Cloud segments before Liferay DXP 2026.Q4). How you can use each segment depends on its category and type.

Note

Asset Categorization criteria require Liferay DXP 2026.Q2 or later. Earlier DXP versions do not send vocabulary and category data to LDP, so those criteria return no results even when content is correctly tagged or categorized.

Segment Types

Every LDP segment has a category and a type. The category determines what the segment groups: Individual segments group people, and Account segments group accounts. The type determines how LDP evaluates membership: Batch segments recalculate on a schedule, and Real-Time segments evaluate events as they arrive.

Category	Batch	Real-Time
Individual	✔	✔
Account	✔

Build an Account segment to answer a question about organizations rather than people, such as which companies in a given industry have engaged with your content recently. A segment’s criteria can combine an account’s own attributes, such as industry and revenue, with the behavior of the individuals who belong to it.

An Account segment is always a Batch segment, so LDP recalculates its membership on the batch schedule rather than as events arrive. Review and export the membership from the segment’s dashboard, and reuse it on the Accounts dashboard, where the Segment filter narrows the list of accounts to one segment’s members.

For Individual segments, the type also determines which criteria you can use and what you can do with the segment in Liferay DXP. Batch segments created in LDP sync with Liferay DXP, where you can use them in experiences, collections, and other features that accept a segment.

Individual Segments	Batch	Real-Time
Criteria	Every criteria group	Behavioral only, on a Default tab and a Custom tab
Membership	Recalculated three hours after the previous recalculation finishes	Evaluated against each criterion’s own time window, set in hours (up to 24) or days (up to 30)
In Liferay DXP	Syncs to the backend and drives experiences, collections, A/B tests, and recommendations	Syncs to the backend and drives Audiences only (Liferay DXP 2026.Q4 and later)

Note

Liferay DXP can target both Individual segment types using Audiences, which matches a segment by its external reference code (ERC). Audiences requires the LPD-85746 release feature flag.

Criteria Categories

Segment criteria appear in four separate categories.

Category	Panel Group	Description
Behavioral	Events	Filters individuals or accounts by the actions they performed, such as submitting a form or viewing a blog article. You can use Liferay’s built-in events or custom events set up for your workspace. Configure behavioral criteria by choosing whether the action was or was not performed, specifying a frequency (at least, or at most a certain number of times), and defining a time frame (since a date, within a period, or during the last 90 days).
Attributes	Individual, Account, Organization, Session	Filters individuals or accounts by properties that describe them or their context. Available attribute types include Individual (age, country, industry, Known Since Date, and DXP custom fields), Account, Organization (name, hierarchy, and type), and Session (browser, channel, device, geolocation, referrer, timestamp, URL, and UTM parameter). Account attributes come from external systems connected to LDP as data sources, such as Salesforce, so the attributes offered vary by workspace.
Asset Categorization	Vocabularies and Categories, Tags	Filters individuals by DXP tags and vocabulary categories assigned to content they have interacted with. Use Vocabularies and Categories to target interactions with specific categories, or Tags to target interactions with tagged content. Both criteria support the has and has not operators.
Intent Signals	Interests, Search Terms	Filters individuals by their interests or their searches. The Interests criterion targets individuals according to their topic affinities and content preferences. A Search Terms criterion uses one search term recorded on your sites. Choose is to include the individuals who searched for it, or is not to exclude them.

The segment determines which groups the panel offers.

Segment	Groups in the Segment Criteria Panel
Individual Batch	Events, Individual, Account, Interests, Search Terms, Session, Vocabularies and Categories, Tags, and Organization
Individual Real-Time	Events
Account Batch	Events and Account

In an Individual Real-Time segment, the panel splits the Events group across a Default tab for Liferay’s built-in events and a Custom tab for your own.

In an Individual segment, each event criterion is labeled Individual. In an Account segment, the same criterion is labeled Account.

People trigger events, so an account matches an event criterion when at least one of its individuals triggered the event as the criterion specifies. With the has not operator, the account matches only when none of them did. LDP checks each criterion on its own, so two criteria can match through different individuals. Anonymous individuals count only when Include Anonymous is enabled.

Creating a Segment

You must select a category and a type when creating a segment, and you can’t change either afterward. Batch segments evaluate their criteria on a schedule and can include anonymous individuals. Real-Time segments evaluate Behavioral criteria as events arrive and can require events to occur in a set order.

Account segments match the accounts LDP has consolidated from your connected systems, so connect a data source that supplies account data before you build one. Without it, an Account segment has nothing to match. See Accounts for where that data comes from.

Click Segments under the People section in the left navigation panel.
Click New Segment in the upper-right corner and select an option from the drop-down menu. See Segment Types.

The menu groups the options by category: Account offers Batch Segment, and Individual offers Batch Segment and Real Time Segment.
Click Edit () next to Unnamed Segment and enter a name.
(Optional) Edit the Segment ERC. LDP generates a value automatically.

An ERC must be unique, and it can contain only lowercase letters, numbers, hyphens, and underscores. For an Individual segment, the ERC is the external reference code Liferay DXP uses to match it.

Important

When you change an Individual segment’s ERC, you must update every audience targeting that segment to use the new value.
Drag criteria from the Segment Criteria panel to the builder canvas. See Criteria Categories.

As you build a Batch segment, the toolbar reports the current match count: Total Accounts in an Account segment, Total Members in an Individual segment.
(Optional) For Batch segments, enable Include Anonymous to include anonymous individuals.

Important

Criteria containing individual or account attributes always exclude anonymous individuals, regardless of this setting.
Click Save Segment. LDP begins evaluating individuals or accounts against your criteria.

The segment appears on the Segments dashboard right away, where the Type column shows its category, Account or Individual, and the Sync Frequency column shows its type, Batch or Real-Time. Its membership stays empty until the first evaluation finishes.

Building Criteria Rules

After adding criteria to the builder, you can modify them as needed:

To move a criterion: Click and drag it using the vertical dots () on its left.
To delete a criterion: Click Delete (), or click Actions () and select Delete.
To duplicate a criterion: Click Actions () and select Duplicate.

Adjacent criteria are connected by a logical operator. Click AND / OR between them to switch operators:

AND narrows the segment by requiring both conditions. For example, it matches visitors from France who viewed a product page.
OR broadens the segment by matching either condition. For example, it matches visitors from France as well as anyone who viewed a product page.

To create nested rules, drag one criterion onto another to form a subgroup. The subgroup connects to adjacent criteria with its own logical operator, so you can create more complex segment definitions.

Ordering Events in a Real-Time Segment

A Real-Time segment includes an Order card between the Segment ERC field and the builder. Turn on Enable Sequential to require that the second event comes after the first, with any number of events in between. While the toggle is off, the events can occur in any order.

Sequential order limits how large the criteria can grow. The top-level AND group accepts five criteria, and a nested OR group accepts three conditions. The builder warns you when a group reaches its limit, and it reports an error and blocks the save when a group passes it.

On the Segments dashboard, a Real-Time segment that uses sequential order carries an S label in its Sync Frequency column. Hover over the label to read the Sequential Event Order description.

Configuring Activation

LDP gives each segment a Liferay DXP activation when you save it. An Individual Batch segment’s page shows the activation in an Activations card, as a Liferay DXP entry with a label that reports its schedule. The entry has no on or off switch.

The schedule runs indefinitely by default. You can limit it to a date range instead. Outside that range, LDP doesn’t recalculate the segment’s membership.

Go to the Segments dashboard and click an Individual Batch segment.
Hover over the Liferay DXP entry in the Activations card and click Edit.
Select a Frequency. Between limits the schedule to a start and end date, up to 365 days apart. Indefinitely removes the limit.
Click Save Configuration.

Next Steps

To group the visitors who arrive from a campaign, see Segmenting Visitors by Campaign.

For an Account segment, open it to review its membership and export the list. See Account Segment Dashboards.

An Individual Batch segment must reach the connected Liferay DXP instance before you can target it there. By default, Liferay DXP pulls this list every 60 minutes, so a new segment can take up to an hour to appear. To change the interval, see Integrating Liferay Data Platform with Liferay DXP. See Getting Analytics for User Segments for the conditions a segment meets before Liferay DXP can use it.