Qualification of profiles in segments with more than 50 Identities

Description

Environment
Adobe Experience Platform

Issue/Symptoms
Can Profiles with more than 50 Identities qualify for segments?

Resolution

When segments are defined to use Private Graph, the normal process is that profile fragments are queried using all IDs in the identity graph, and the results are pulled together into a single profile combining profile records and event records. But when an identity graph has more than 50 entities, the profile fragments are not assembled into one profile. Instead, each profile fragment is treated as a whole profile, and the segment evaluation happens against each fragment individually.

For example, a segment defined to include California residents will evaluate to true for the profile fragment containing the state attribute, but the other profile and event fragments will evaluate to false. Similarly, a segment defined to include web page browsing will evaluate to true for the Analytics report suite fragment, but the profile fragments and other event fragments will evaluate to false. The risk is when the segment contains a negative condition, e.g., no email was sent in the past week. The email event won’t be tied to any profile or other events records, so the evaluation of the profile and other events could generate a false positive.

To prevent any fragment from evaluating to true, one approach is to include a condition on both a profile attribute AND an event, e.g., where customer_id exists and at least one event exists. No fragment will have both criteria, so no fragment will evaluate as true. Usually, it’s possible to add existence tests on both profiles and events without altering the segmentation results, e.g., testing for a CRM ID when segmenting known customers.

To determine if the Identity graph has more than 50 entries for an identity, use Postman to call the UPS via the API with the identity ID as shown below.  The response will include the noted error if the maximum of 50 has been exceeded.

Postman API configuration

GET /data/core/ups/access/entities?entityId=KRN1136260447&entityIdNS=custid&schema.name=_xdm.context.profile HTTP/1.1
Host: platform.adobe.io
Content-Type: application/json
Authorization: Bearer
x-gw-ims-org-id: <b></b><b></b>*
x-api-key: acp_onboarding

Response:

{
    "message": "Received too many related identities. Received: 85, Maximum: 50.",
    "statusCode": 422,
    "type": "http://ns.adobe.com/aep/errors/UPSDK-112004-422",
    "title": "Too many related identities.",
    "error-code": "UPSDK-112004-422",
    "error-message": "Received too many related identities. Received: 85, Maximum: 50.",
    "status": 422
}