Skip to main content

Cookie Condition for Audience Targeting and Goals

· 3 min read

We’re introducing Cookie Conditions that gives you more flexibility when targeting users and defining experiment goals.

With this feature, you can now check for the presence of a specific browser cookie, optionally matching:

  • a key/value pair inside the cookie
  • a plain cookie value
  • or simply the existence of the cookie

This condition is available in both Audience targeting and Goals, making it easier to personalize experiences and measure behavior based on cookie data.

Why This Matters​

Cookies are often used by applications to store information such as:

  • user identifiers
  • session data
  • feature flags
  • preference settings
  • tracking attributes from external systems

The new Cookie Condition allows experiments to react directly to this stored information, enabling more precise segmentation and measurement.

How It Works​

When creating a rule, select Cookie as the condition type. You can then define:

  1. Cookie Name – the name of the cookie to inspect
  2. Optional Key – if the cookie stores structured key/value data
  3. Optional Value – the value to compare against

Example 1 — Check Cookie Exists​

Target users who have a cookie named logged_in.

Cookie: logged_in
Condition: exists

This is useful for experiments that should only run for authenticated users.

Example 2 — Match a Plain Cookie Value​

Check whether the cookie plan equals premium.

Cookie: plan
Value: premium

This enables targeting users based on subscription tiers or account types.

Example 3 — Match a Key/Value Pair​

If a cookie stores structured data such as:

preferences=theme=dark&layout=grid

You can check a specific key:

Cookie: preferences
Key: theme
Value: dark

This allows targeting based on individual attributes within a cookie.

Use Cases​

Audience Targeting​

You can now include cookies directly in audience rules, for example:

  • Show a campaign only to users with campaign_source=partner
  • Target returning users with a visited=true cookie
  • Personalize experiences based on stored preferences

Goal Tracking​

The same condition can be used in Goals to measure outcomes:

  • Track conversions when a purchase_complete=true cookie appears
  • Measure events set by your backend through cookies
  • Capture external system signals stored in cookies

More Flexible Experimentation​

This new condition expands the ways you can integrate experiments with your existing application logic and tracking systems. Instead of relying solely on page events or custom scripts, experiments can now react directly to client-side cookie data.

If your application already uses cookies to store state or attributes, you can immediately use that information to target audiences and define experiment success criteria.

Give it a try in your next experiment and let us know how you use it!