Understanding Group Structures in Contact Search

How AND, OR and NOT work

Force24 uses standard Boolean operators (AND, OR and NOT) to decide whether a contact matches your query.

OR broadens your audience

OR means a contact only needs to match one of the conditions. For example:

OR
├── Opened an email in the last 30 days
└── Visited the website in the last 30 days

This would return contacts who have done either activity. Be careful with an OR in the master group, because it contains all other groups and would make the entire search very loose.

AND narrows your audience

AND means a contact must match every condition. For example:

AND
├── Opened an email in the last 30 days
└── Visited the website in the last 30 days

This returns a smaller audience because contacts must satisfy both rules.

NOT excludes contacts

NOT excludes contacts who match the conditions. For example:

NOT
└── Segment | Is | Admin List

Exclude contacts who are in the Admin List.

NOT is commonly used when building exclusions and suppression criteria.

Why are AND and OR sometimes greyed out?

AND and OR only exist to compare multiple items (rules or other groups) within a group. For example:

OR
├── Rule A
└── Rule B

or

AND
├── Rule A
└── Group 1

In both cases, Contact Search is evaluating the relationship between multiple items. However, if a group only contains a single rule:

NOT
└── Segment = Admin List

there is nothing to compare. You can have:

• Rule A AND Rule B
• Rule A OR Rule B

But you cannot meaningfully have:

• Rule A AND nothing
• Rule A OR nothing

Because of this, Force24 disables the AND and OR controls whenever a group contains only a single item. The selected value becomes irrelevant until another rule or subgroup is added. You will still see NOT available because NOT can work perfectly well on a single rule or group by itself. If you want the AND and OR options to become available again, simply add another rule to the group or another subgroup inside the group. Once there are multiple items to compare, the AND and OR controls become meaningful and can be selected again.

Why group structure matters

Two queries can contain exactly the same rules but return completely different audiences depending on how the groups are arranged. For example:

AND
├── OR
│   ├── Segment A
│   └── Segment B
└── Visited URL X

This means:

Return contacts who are either in Segment A or Segment B, and who have also visited URL X.

Whereas:

OR
├── OR
│   ├── Segment A
│   └── Segment B
└── Visited URL X

Means:

Return contacts who are in Segment A or Segment B, or who have visited URL X.

The second query will usually return significantly more contacts. This is why understanding groups is sometimes more important than understanding the individual rules themselves.

The master group

When you open Contact Search, the empty area you are presented with is your master group. Every rule you add sits inside this master group, and every additional group you create also sits inside it. For example:

MASTER GROUP AND
├── Rule A
├── Rule B
└── Group 1
    ├── Rule C
    └── Group 2
        ├── Rule D
        └── Rule E

Groups can also contain other groups. This allows you to build simple or highly sophisticated audience selections by combining rules together in different ways. The important thing to remember is that Contact Search does not just look at the rules themselves, it also looks at how those rules are grouped together.

In this first example, the master group is set to AND:

Inside it are two smaller groups:

• A group containing two Segment rules joined with OR
• A group containing a URL rule

Because the master group uses AND, the query is asking for contacts who are:

• In either of the Segments
• AND have visited the specified URL.

A contact must satisfy both parts of the query to be included. In this second example, the rules inside the groups are exactly the same, but the master group is set to OR instead:

This changes the query to:

• In either of the Segments
• OR have visited the specified URL.

Because only one condition needs to be true, the audience returned will be much larger. This demonstrates an important point: changing the master group can completely change the meaning of your query, even when all of the individual rules remain exactly the same.