Segments are one of the most powerful ways to unlock value with Vector. They let you define who you care about based on what they’re doing—whether they’re visiting your site, clicking your ads, or researching your industry behind the scenes. Segments help you find the right people at the right time and take action, automatically.

🔍 Common Use Cases

Here are just a few ways teams are using Segments to fuel pipeline and boost campaign performance:

🧲 Marketing Use Cases

• Website De-anonymization Identify which known contacts are visiting your website, landing pages, or blog content.

• Off-site intent See who’s researching your category, competitors, or relevant keywords—even if they haven’t landed on your site yet.

• Ad Reveal Understand who’s clicking your ads but not converting. Where is your brand getting attention in-market?

• Ad audience optimization Build smarter ad audiences based on off-site intent signals to maximize ad spend.

🤝 Sales Use Cases

Create serendipity. You’re aiming for “I was just on your website—what a coincidence you’re calling now!”

• All site visitors See how your website is resonating with known contacts.

• Target accounts landing on your website Prioritize outbound based on actual engagement—not guesswork.

• Contacts in open opportunities visiting your site Signal deal movement or warm-up before a check-in call.

• Contacts hitting your demo page but not submitting a form Perfect moment for light outreach or a helpful nudge.

📄 Want to get even smarter with your setup? Check out our Segment Best Practices → for tips on filtering, naming conventions, optimization, and more.

🧠 Want to skip the setup and get started fast? Check out our Playbooks—pre-built segments with triggers, filters, and actions already set up for common use cases like intent-based outreach, ad engagement, and ABM. You can use them as-is or tweak them to fit your goals. Explore Playbooks →

Here’s how to create a custom segment from scratch:

🚀 Step 1: Click “New Segment”

From your Vector dashboard, head to the Segments tab and click the New Segment button.
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🎯 Step 2: Choose a Trigger

A trigger is what tells Vector when to include someone in this segment. You’ll see two main types in the “New Segment” flow:

Visitors on my site

Based on traffic in your Visitor Feed, this trigger captures known contacts who land on your website.

In-market contacts doing research

These are contacts showing buying intent based on their research behavior across the web—looking at you, your industry, keywords, or competitors. Learn more about intent topics →

📍 Wait—where’s the Ad Reveal trigger?

Great question! The Ad Reveal trigger works a little differently. It’s not available from the standard “New Segment” flow.

To create a segment based on ad engagement:

1. Head to the Ad Reveal tab in the left-hand toolbar.

2. Click the Create Segment button in the top right corner.

🧰 Step 3: Add Filters

This is where you fine-tune who qualifies for your segment. You can mix and match filters like:

• Target accounts

• Job data (title, seniority, etc.)

• Firmographics (industry, company size, location)

• Behavior (intent topics, page views, ad clicks)

• Business Units (Available on Plus, Growth & Enterprise plans)

  • You can apply a Business Unit in one click when building a new segment—no need to start from scratch every time with multiple filters.

  • Business Units let you pre-set:

    • Buyer personas (e.g. title, department, seniority)

    • Intent topics

    • Multiple target account lists (from HubSpot, Salesforce, or CSV)

    • 💡 Learn more about Business Units →

✅ Best Practices:

• Email is known is great if you’re pushing data to HubSpot or Salesforce as an Action (learn more about Actions below). It ensures we can match to existing records or create new ones.

• LinkedIn URL is known is useful if you're planning to send notifications to Slack—your team can jump into action with all the right context.

✅ Pro tip: Start broad and narrow later. It’s often easier to begin with simple filters, then optimize over time as you see what works.

📊 Step 4: Run Audience Estimate

Once you’ve added your filters, click Estimate Audience to get a sense of the segment’s size.

⚠ This number is just an estimate—it’s directional, not definitive. Think of it as a rough sketch based on the criteria you’ve set. The actual number of contacts flowing into the segment will depend on real-time data and updates.
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If the estimate is over 30,000, you’ll need to narrow your filters—this helps keep your segment targeted and actionable.
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🔍 Dive deeper: How Audience Estimate works →

🔁 Step 5: Add an Action

This is where you decide what happens next. The data you’re capturing is only as valuable as how you act on it—so think of this as the final puzzle piece that makes everything click.

You can:

• API & Integrations:

  • Send contacts to HubSpot, Salesforce, or Clay (to name a few)

  • Trigger a webhook

  • 📚 See all integrations & webhook options →

• Export as a CSV

  • CSV data is stored within Vector

    • 💡This is especially helpful if you're testing the waters with Segments and don't want to accidentally push data to the wrong endpoint. You can always update the Action in the future!

🎯 Example Action Use Cases:

• Intent-based contacts researching a specific topic → Sync to your ad platform to retarget with relevant content → Push to Slack or CRM to flag high buying intent

• Website visitors → Send to your CRM (like HubSpot or Salesforce) for outreach → Enrich the contact via tools like Clay to learn more about them

• Ad clickers who didn’t convert → Re-engage with personalized outbound → Trigger nurture campaigns or Slack alerts

• Intent-based contacts researching a specific topic → Get them in front of ads to retarget with relevant content → Push to Slack or CRM to flag high buying intent

• Website visitors → Send to your CRM (like HubSpot or Salesforce) for outreach → Enrich the contact via tools like Clay to learn more about them

• Ad clickers who didn’t convert → Re-engage with personalized outbound → Trigger Slack alerts

🛠 Additional Options

In the top right corner, you'll note a few options:

🤖 Clone a segment

• Don’t want to start from scratch every time? You can easily clone an existing segment.

• For example: if you're tracking one intent topic per segment (💡 smart move!), cloning lets you quickly duplicate the setup and just swap in a new topic.

⚙ Run a test

• You’ll see the option to “Test Run” a segment before fully committing. 🚨 Just note—this is a real run. It will pull data from the past 24 hours and push to your selected action.

  • If your action is a CSV, no worries—it’ll just store that data inside Vector.

  • If your action is something like HubSpot, Salesforce, or a webhook, that data will flow to your endpoint as if it’s live.

✅ Step 6: Activate the Segment

Once your segment is turned on, it’ll continuously update as new people meet the trigger and filter criteria. Segments are dynamic, flexible, and designed to keep your team in sync with buying behavior in real time.