Audience Targeting in the Quick Links Web Part

The Quick Links web part on a SharePoint Online page is a great way to share a number of relevant link in a compact space. However, you may not always want everyone to see every link in the web part. Now you can use Audience Targeting within the Quick Links web part to filter out who sees what links on the page. Here’s how it works…

Here I have a page with a Quick Links web part, and there are three links to internet search engines. However, I only want a particular group of people to see the Bing search engine link. First, I need to turn on Audience Targeting for the entire Quick Links web part by clicking on the Pencil icon:

In the Quick links configuration panel, I turn Enable audience targeting on:

Now I can assign audience targeting to each link in the web part. To do that, I click on the Pencil icon for the particular link I want to have filtered:

In the Audiences to target field, I can enter up to 50 Active Directory groups for filtering. What this means is that I have to be part of one of those groups in order to be able to see the link. In this case, I’m using an Active Directory group for interns that I’m not part of:

Now when I publish the page, I no longer see the link to Bing in the Quick Links web part:

One thing to remember… Audience targeting is *not* security. If I was linking to something like a SharePoint list and a filter prevented them from seeing the link, it does not mean they would be restricted from getting to that list in other ways. This is only a tool to increase page focus so that people only see things that are relevant to them.