DocumentationAnalyticsComponents Guide

Publish segments to Experience Cloud

Last update: Fri Jan 31 2025 00:00:00 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)
  • Topics:
  • Segmentation

CREATED FOR:

  • User
  • Admin

Publishing an Adobe Analytics segment to Experience Cloud lets you use the segment for marketing activity in Audience Manager and in other activation channels, including Adobe’s Advertising Cloud, Target, and Campaign.

You can publish Analytics segments to Experience Cloud in under 8 hours. Use these segments to activate audiences in Audience Manager to all downstream destinations.

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See VideoCheckedOut Publish segments for a demo video.

NOTE
Adobe Campaign (Classic and Standard) behaves differently in that it incurs an additional 24-hour latency on top of the 8-hour latency.

Prerequisites

  • Ensure that the report suite that you are saving this segment to is enabled for Experience Cloud. Otherwise you cannot publish it to Experience Cloud.
  • Ensure that your organization is using Experience Cloud IDs.
  • Before you can publish segments, your Admin needs to assign the Segment Publishing permission to a product profile in the Admin Console, and add you to the product profile.

Considerations

  • Report Suite limits: You can publish up to 75 segments per report suite. This limit is enforced. If you already have 75 segments published, you cannot publish any additional segments until you un-publish enough segments to get below the 75-segment threshold.
  • Membership limits: Audiences shared to the Experience Cloud from Adobe Analytics cannot exceed 20 million unique members.
  • Data Privacy: Audiences are not filtered based on the authentication state of a visitor. If a visitor can browse your site in un-authenticated and authenticated states, actions that occur when a visitor is un-authenticated can still cause a visitor to be included in an audience. Review Adobe Experience Cloud privacy to understand the full privacy implications of audience sharing.
  • For a discussion about the differences between segments in Adobe Analytics and Audience Manager, go here.

Segment publishing timeline

What’s available
When it’s available
Where it’s available
Meta data (segment title and definition)
Immediately after publishing
Audience Manager, Experience Cloud Audience Library, Target
Usable segment with membership
~ 8 hours after publishing
Visitor Profile Viewer in Audience Manager
Trait and membership population
Within 24-48 hours
Audience Manager
NOTE
Once a week, all data will be fully synced to account for any deltas or discrepancies not captured in the previous week.

Publish segments in Segment Builder

  1. In Adobe Analytics, go to Components > Segments
  2. Select Add to create a new segment.
    Publish Experience Cloud
  3. Provide a title and a description for the segment. These fields are required before saving.
  4. In the Experience Cloud publishing section, select the option, Publish this segment to the Experience Cloud (for report suite).
IMPORTANT
Make sure that you use “Visitors with Experience Cloud ID” when looking at segment previews in Analytics instead of the total “unique visitors” segment preview when comparing Adobe Analytics numbers to Audience Manager numbers:
Segment visitors with ECID
Element
Description
Publish this segment to the Experience Cloud (for <report suite>)
When this option is enabled, the segment title and definition (i.e. the shell audience as often used in ad platforms) are shared with Experience Cloud instantaneously, while the segment membership is evaluated and shared every 4 hours.
When that audience is associated with an activity in Target, for example, Analytics begins sending IDs for visitors that qualify for that Experience Cloud and Target audience. At that point, the audience name and corresponding data begins displaying on the Audience Library page in Experience Cloud.
Audience Creation Window
The time frame you select is used to create the audience on a rolling-calendar basis. For example, “Last 30 days” (default) includes visitors that have qualified for the audience over the last 30 days from today’s date (NOT from the original date when the segment was created.)
Create in Audience Library
The segments that you create and publish can be made available without latency on the Audience Library page in Experience Cloud. They are not dependent on Analytics updates. These segments do not count against your limit of 75 published segments.
x of 75 Published
Shows the number of segments you have published to Experience Cloud. Click the link to see a list of published segments and their associated report suite and owner.
Save
Saves this segment.

Unpublish or delete segments

To delete a segment that has been published to Experience Cloud, you have to unpublish it first. To unpublish a segment, just unclick the checkbox that you used to publish it.

NOTE
You cannot unpublish a segment that is currently in use by any of the following Adobe solutions: Analytics (in Audience Analytics), Campaign, Advertising Cloud (for Core Service & Audience Manager customers) and all other external partners (for Audience Manager customers). You can unpublish a segment that is in use by Target.

View the publishing status of segments

The maximum number of publishable Adobe Analytics segments is 75.

To view published segments:

  1. In Adobe Analytics, go to Components > Segments.

  2. View the Published column. Yes in this column indicates that the segment has been published to Experience Cloud. No indicates that it has not.

    Publish status

Retrieve the Audience Manager UUID

There are two ways to capture the Adobe Audience Manager UUID currently associated with the browser:

  • Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger
  • Native developer tool in browsers (e.g., Chrome Developer Tools)

The following screenshots show you how to retrieve the Adobe Audience Manager UUID on your browser and use it in Audience Manager Visitor Profile Viewer to validate trait & segment membership.

Method 1: Use Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger

  1. Download and install Adobe Experience Cloud Debugger in the Chrome Web Store.
  2. Launch the debugger when loading a page.
  3. Scroll to the Audience Manager section and find the Adobe Audience Manager UUID set on the current browser page
    (50814298273775797762943354787774730612 in the example below)

Debugger

Method 2: Use Chrome Developer Tools (or other browser developer tools)

  1. Launch Chrome Developer Tools before loading a page
  2. Load the page and check Applications > Cookies. The Adobe Audience Manager UUID should be set in the 3rd-party
    Demdex cookie (adobe.demdex.net in the example below). The field demdex is the Adobe Audience Manager UUID set
    on the browser (50814298273775797762943354787774730612 in the example below).

Chrome Developer Tools

Use Audience Manager Visitor Profile Viewer

The Adobe Audience Manager UUID on the browser will be used by default when Visitor Profile Viewer is loaded. If verifying trait realizations for other users, input a UUID in the UUID field and click Refresh. Refer to Visitor Profile Viewer for more information.

Audience Manager profile viewer

View the segment traits in Audience Manager

In Adobe Audience Manager, the list of visitors with ECIDs for a given segment are evaluated in a streaming fashion as Analytics shares segments with Experience Cloud.

  1. In Audience Manager, go to Audience Data > Traits > Analytics Traits. You will see a folder for each Analytics reports suite that is mapped to your Experience Cloud organization. These folders (for Traits, Segments, and Data Sources) get created when the Profiles and Audiences/People core service gets initiated or provisioned.

  2. Select the folder for the report suite in which you previously created the segment you wanted to share with Audience Manager. You will see the segment/audience you created. When you share a segment, 2 things happen in Audience Manager:

    • A trait gets created, first with no data in it. Approx. 8 hours after the segment gets published in Analytics, the list of ECIDs gets onboarded and shared with Audience Manager and other Experience Cloud solutions.

      Audience manager traits

    • A one-trait segment gets created. It uses the data source that is associated with the report suite where you published the segment.

    • Trait expiration is now set to 16 days (previously it was 2 days).

View the segment in Adobe Target

The Publish this segment to the Experience Cloud checkbox during the segment creation process in Adobe Analytics allows the segment to be available within the Adobe Target’s custom audience library. A segment created in Analytics or Audience Manager can be used for activities in Target. For example, you can create campaign activities based on Analytics conversion metrics and audience segments created in Analytics.

  1. Click Audiences.
  2. On the Audiences page, locate the audience sourced from the Experience Cloud. These audiences are available for use in Target activities.
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