Many enterprise intranets suffer from the same problem, there's too much content, and most of it isn't meant for the person reading it. Head office news crowds out local news, and announcements for one office show up in front of everyone else.
Audience targeting is the SharePoint feature that helps with this. You choose who a news post, link or event is for, and SharePoint promotes it to them and keeps it out of everyone else's web parts. Think of it as a filtering mechanism, actioned via permissions groups.
The One Thing to Understand First
Audience targeting is about relevance, not security. It decides what gets promoted to someone, not what they're allowed to open. If a page is sensitive, use permissions. If you just want to keep the feed tidy, use audience targeting.
Where It Works
Audience targeting works on many webparts including:
- News
- Events
- Pages
- Quick links
How It Works, in Plain Terms
- Create a group. Audiences are based on Microsoft 365 or Entra ID groups, such as "Finance team" or "Valencia office".
- Switch it on. Turn on audience targeting for the Site Pages library, and for each webpart and/or list where you want it.
- Pick the audience. On a news post, page, event or link, choose which groups it's for.
- Check it. Look at the intranet as someone in the group and someone outside it. You see everything while editing, so this step is easy to skip, and it matters.
Let the Groups Look After Themselves
The biggest practical headache is keeping group membership up to date. If someone has to add every new starter by hand, it won't last. Entra ID can build groups automatically from information it already holds about people, such as country or department, a dynamic group. Dynamic groups need a licence level that most Microsoft 365 business plans include, but check which one applies to your tenant before you plan around it.
Using It on a Multilingual Intranet
Two features do two different jobs here.
- Language filtering decides which language of content a web part shows. For News, you can filter by language so French readers see French posts and English readers see English ones.
- Audience targeting decides who a post is for, regardless of language. Use it for things like country, office or team.
Used together, they let you do more than either one alone. A news post in French can be targeted to the France office only, while a company-wide post in English goes to everyone.
The good news is that translations keep the original page's audience. Set it once on the English page, create the translation, and the French version has the same audience without any extra step.
A Simple Way to Start
- Filter your News web parts by language
- Create groups for the offices or countries that need their own content
- Set the audience on the original page, and let translations follow
- Test with one real person in each group before rolling out
- Check once a month for pages with no audience set, since those are shown to everyone
Common Questions
Does audience targeting hide a page?
No. It only changes what is promoted. The page itself is still reachable by anyone with permission to view it.
Does it affect search?
No. Search results are governed by permissions, not audience targeting, if someone has permission to view a page, it still appears in their search results whether or not they're in the targeted audience.
Do I need it?
Only once your intranet has enough content that people stop finding what matters to them. For a small site, you probably don't.