Activate profiles and segments to a destination

Activate the data you have in Adobe Experience Platform by mapping segments to destinations. To accomplish this, follow the steps below.

Prerequisites

To activate data to destinations, you must have successfully connected a destination. If you haven’t done so already, go to the destinations catalog, browse the supported destinations, and set up one or more destinations.

Activate data

The steps in the activation workflow vary slightly between destination types. The complete workflow for all destination types is outlined below.

Select which destination to activate data to

Applies to: All destinations

In the Platform user interface, navigate to Destinations > Browse, and select the destination where you want to activate your segments.

Select the name of the destination to navigate to the activation workflow.

Note that if an activation workflow already exists for a destination, you can see the segments that are currently being activated to the destination. Select Edit activation in the right rail and follow the steps below to modify the activation details.

Once you have selected a destination, select Activate.

Select Segments step

Applies to: All destinations

In the Activate destination workflow, on the Select Segments page, select one or more segments to activate to the destination. Select Next to proceed to the next step.

Identity mapping step

Applies to: social destinations and Google Customer Match advertising destination

For social destinations, you can select source attributes to map as target identities in the destination. This step is either optional or mandatory, depending on which primary identity you are using in the schema.

If you are using email address as primary identity in your schema, you can skip the Identity mapping step, as shown below:

If you are using another ID, such as “Rewards ID” or “Loyalty ID”, as primary identity in your schema, you need to manually map the email address from your identity schema as a target identity in the social destination, as shown below:

Select Email_LC_SHA256 as target identity if you hashed customer email addresses on data ingestion into Adobe Experience Platform, according to Facebook email hashing requirements.

Select Email as target identity if the email addresses you are using are not hashed. Platform will hash the email addresses to comply with Facebook requirements.

Configure step

Applies to: Email marketing destinations and cloud storage destinations

In the Configure step, you can configure the schedule and the file names for each segment you are exporting. Configuring the schedule is mandatory, but configuring the file name is optional.

To add a schedule for the segment, select Create schedule.

A popover appears, showing options to create the segment schedule.

• File export: You have the option to either export either full files or incremental files. Exporting a full file publishes a complete snapshot of all the profiles that qualify for that segment. Exporting an incremental file publishes the delta of profiles that qualify for that segment since the last export.
• Frequency: If Export full files is selected, you have the option to export Once or Daily. If Export incremental files is selected, you only have the option to export Daily. Exporting a file Once exports the file one time. Exporting a file Daily exports the file every day from the start date to the end date at 12:00 AM UTC (7:00 PM EST) if full files is selected and 12:00 PM UTC (7:00 AM EST) if incremental files is selected.
• Date: If Once is selected, you can select the date for the one time export. If Daily is selected, you can select the start and end dates for the exports.

The default file names consist of destination name, segment ID, and a date and time indicator. For example, you can edit your exported file names to distinguish between different campaigns or to have the data export time appended to the files.

Select the pencil icon to open a modal window and edit the file names. Note that file names are limited to 255 characters.

In the file name editor, you can select different components to add to the file name. The destination name and segment ID cannot be removed from file names. In addition to these, you can add the following:

• Segment name: You can append the segment name to the file name.
• Date and time: Select between adding a MMDDYYYY_HHMMSS format or a Unix 10-digit timestamp of the time when the files are generated. Choose one of these options if you would like your files to have a dynamic file name generated with each incremental export.
• Custom text: Add custom text to the file names.

Select Apply changes to confirm your selection.

Once you have finishing configuring all your segments, select Next to continue.

Segment schedule step

Applies to: advertising destinations, social destinations

On the Segment schedule page, you can set the start date for sending data to the destination, as well as the frequency of sending data to the destination.

Scheduling step

Applies to: email marketing destinations and cloud storage destinations

On the Scheduling page, you can see the start date for sending data to the destination as well as the frequency of sending data to the destination. These values cannot be edited.

Select attributes step

Applies to: email marketing destinations and cloud storage destinations

On the Select attributes page, select Add new field and choose the attributes that you want to send to the destination.

File exports will vary in the following ways, depending on whether segmentMembership.status is selected:

• If the segmentMembership.status field is selected, exported files include Active members in the initial full snapshot and Active and Expired members in subsequent incremental exports.
• If the segmentMembership.status field is not selected, exported files include only Active members in the initial full snapshot and in subsequent incremental exports.

Additionally, you can mark different attributes as mandatory. Marking an attribute as mandatory makes it so the exported segment must contain that attribute. As a result, it can be used as an additionally form of filtering. Marking an attribute as mandatory is not required.

It is recommended that one of the attributes is a unique identifier from your schema. For more information about mandatory attributes, see the identity section in the Email marketing destinations documentation.

Review step

Applies to: all destinations

On the Review page, you can see a summary of your selection. Select Cancel to break up the flow, Back to modify your settings, or Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

If no policy violations have been detected, select Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

Edit activation

Follow the steps below to edit existing activation flows in Platform:

1. Select Destinations in the left navigation bar, then click the Browse tab, and click the destination name.
2. Select Edit activation in the right rail to change which segments to send to the destination.

Verify that segment activation was successful

Email marketing destinations and cloud storage destinations

For email marketing destinations and cloud storage destinations, Platform creates a tab-delimited .csv or .txt file in the storage location that you provided. Expect a new file to be created in your storage location every day. The default file format is:
<destinationName>_segment<segmentID>_<timestamp-yyyymmddhhmmss>.csv|txt

Note that you can edit the file format. For more information, go to the Configure step for cloud storage destinations and email marketing destinations.

With the default file format, the files you would receive on three consecutive days could look like this:

Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200408061804.csv
Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200409052200.csv
Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200410061130.csv

The presence of these files in your storage location is confirmation of successful activation. To understand how the exported files are structured, you can download a sample .csv file. This sample file includes the profile attributes person.firstname, person.lastname, person.gender, person.birthyear, and personalEmail.address.

Advertising destinations

Check your account in the respective advertising destination that you are activating your data to. If activation was successful, audiences are populated in your advertising platform.

Social network destinations

For Facebook, a successful activation means that a Facebook custom audience would be created programmatically in Facebook Ads Manager. Segment membership in the audience would be added and removed as users are qualified or disqualified for the activated segments.

Disable activation

To disable an existing activation flow, follow the steps below:

1. Select Destinations in the left navigation bar, then click the Browse tab, and click the destination name.
2. Click the Enabled control in the right rail to change the activation flow state.
3. In the Update data flow state window, select Confirm to disable the activation flow.