Audience Builder

Audiences

An audience represents a collection of contacts that are grouped based on attributes that are used when they receive a message. An audience draws information from a sendable data extension. Audience Builder sets a flag in the header of the data extension noting it as an audience. Outbound Mail Manager (OMM) uses this information to determine which channel, audience, and segment engaged the contact with a message.

You can publish an audience for use in a send or other activities.

Audience Builder can use any lists, groups, or data extensions linked through a common subscriber key or ID. You can add attributes to Audience Builder without adding more dimensions to them. Audience Builder only supports queries performed via the expression builder.

Note We recommend using a subscriber key with Audience Builder. You can implement Audience Builder to use the email address as the customer key.

To send an email via Marketing Cloud Engagement, use the audience data extension template. When sending to the audience object, subscriber behavior is tracked in the template. Audience Builder also supports other channels, such as mobile and social.

You can use audiences for suppression with user-initiated and wizard-based sending tools.

Audiences can include ID and code values:

• IDs and Codes represent distinct entities.
• Audience Builder requires IDs. Codes represent optional values.
• IDs uniquely identify the audience object.
• IDs help reporting and tracking activities. Use these values to manage audiences and segments.
• The Summary screen lists a field labeled Audience ID that actually displays a code value.
• Codes don’t require unique values. You can use any applicable value as a code.
• Codes help manage or associate an audience with a campaign.

Audience Builder lists activities in Automation Studio under Data Factory and the Audience Builder Folder. To pick an audience to refresh, use the Build Audience activity.

Segments

A segment represents a group of people who meet a set of user-defined criteria. Use segments for analysis and for targeting in an audience. If you choose not to add a filter, Audience Builder builds segments using the entire available population of contacts from your account. Audiences don’t require segments or audience filters.

You can append attributes to segments in the Publish tab. Appending attributes to segments associates contact content with a segment. Also, you can use AMPscript and Server-Side JavaScript to power a content decision in email. The action is based on a contact’s segment assignment in a specific audience.

Reporting

You can use audiences and segments for reporting. Audience Builder provides a report in the standard email reports section that breaks down the campaign metrics by segment name.

Performance

Every Audience Builder implementation has unique performance characteristics. Work with your implementation team to understand performance expectations.

All systems that process more instructions take longer to complete, but this operation can occur many times faster than a standard query.

We recommend one refresh of Audience Builder data per day. The refresh updates lists and data extensions.

Enterprise Accounts

Audience Builder limits the number of values per dimension to under 1,000. You can use attributes with more than 100 values. Also, you can manage the total at the enterprise, such as 100 dimensions in business unit A and 100 dimensions in business unit B. With this method, despite the same number of dimensions in both business units, the dimensions aren’t from the same dataset. By using the custom attribute selectors, such as starts with, ends with, contains, greater than, and less than, users can access all the values stored in the attribute and use that for criteria in a selection.