Segmentation Service UI guide

Adobe Experience Platform Segmentation Service provides a user interface for creating and managing audiences and segment definitions.

Getting started

Working with audiences and segment definitions requires an understanding of the various Experience Platform services involved with segmentation. Before reading this user guide, please review the documentation for the following services:

• Segmentation Service: Segmentation Service allows you to segment data stored in Experience Platform that relates to individuals (such as customers, prospects, users, or organizations) into smaller groups.
• Real-Time Customer Profile: Provides a unified, real-time consumer profile based on aggregated data from multiple sources.
• Adobe Experience Platform Identity Service: Enables the creation of customer profiles by bridging identities from disparate data sources being ingested into Platform.
• Experience Data Model (XDM): The standardized framework by which Platform organizes customer experience data. To best make use of Segmentation, please ensure your data is ingested as profiles and events according to the best practices for data modeling.

You should also understand two key terms that are used through this document and understand the difference between them:

• Audience: A set of people who share similar behaviors and/or characteristics. This collection of people can either be generated by Adobe Experience Platform using segment definitions or audience composition (Platform-generated audience) or from external sources such as custom uploads (externally generated audience).
• Segment definition: The rules Adobe Experience Platform uses to describe key characteristics or behavior of a target audience.
• Segment: The act of separating Profiles into audiences.

Overview

In the Experience Platform UI, select Audiences in the left navigation to open the Overview tab displaying the Audiences dashboard.

Audiences dashboard

The Audiences dashboard outlines key metrics related to your organization’s audience data.

To learn more, visit the audiences dashboard guide.

Browse

Select the Browse tab to see a list of all the audiences for your organization. This view lists information about the audiences including the profile count, origin, created date, last modified date, tags, and breakdown.

Next to each audience is an ellipsis icon. Selecting this displays a list of available quick actions for the audience. This list of actions differs, based on the audience’s origin.

On the top of the page are options to add all audiences to a schedule, import an audience, create a new audience, and view a breakdown of the update frequency.

Toggling Schedule all audiences will enable scheduled segmentation. More information on scheduled segmentation can be found in the scheduled segmentation section of this user guide.

Selecting Import audience will let you import an externally generate audience. To learn more importing audiences, please read the section on importing an audience in the user guide.

Selecting Create audience will let you create an audience. To learn more about creating audiences, please read the section on creating an audience in the user guide.

You can select Update frequency summary to display a pie chart that shows the update frequency.

The pie chart appears, displaying a breakdown of the audiences by update frequency. The chart displays the total number of audiences in the middle. If you hover over the different parts of the audience, it will display the number of audiences that belong to each update frequency type.

Customize

You can add additional fields to the Browse page by selecting . These additional fields include lifecycle status, update frequency, last updated by, description, created by, and access labels.

If breakdown is selected, the display shows a bar graph outlining the percentage of profiles that belong to each of the following calculated profile statuses: Realized, Existing, and Exiting. Additionally, the breakdown shown on the Browse tab is the most accurate breakdown of the segment definition status. If this number differs with what is stated on the Overview tab, you should use the numbers on the Browse tab as the correct source of information, since the Overview tab numbers only update once per day.

After you selected the fields you want to display, you can also re-size the width of the displayed columns. You can either do this by dragging the area between the columns or by selecting the of the column you want to re-size, followed by Resize column.

Filtering, folders, and tagging

To improve your work efficiency, you can search for existing audiences, add user-defined tags to audiences, put audiences in folders, and filter the displayed audiences.

Search

You can search your existing audiences in up to 9 different languages with Unified Search.

To use Unified Search, add the term you want to search in the highlighted search bar.

For more information about Unified Search, including supported features, please read the Unified Search documentation.

Tags

You can add user-defined tags to better describe, find, and manage your audiences.

To add a tag, select Manage tags on the audience you want to tag.

The Manage tags popover appears. On this popover, you can either select a categorized tag or an uncategorized tag.

After adding all the tags you want to attach to the audience, select Save.

For more information on creating and managing tags, please read the Managing Tags guide.

Folders

You can place audiences within folders for better audience management.

To move an audience into a folder, select Move to folder on the audience you want to move.

The Move audience to folder popover appears. Select the folder you want to move the audience to, then select Save.

Once the audience is in a folder, you can choose to only display audiences that belong to a specific folder.

Filter

You can also filter your audiences, based on a variety of settings.

To filter the available audiences, select the .

The list of available filters is displayed.

Audience details

To see more details about a specific audience, select an audience’s name within the Browse tab.

The audience details page appears. On the top, there is a summary of the audience, information about the qualified audience size, as well as destinations the segment is activated for.

Audience summary

The Audience summary section provides information such as the ID, name, description, origin, and details of the attributes.

Additionally, you are given the option to activate the audience to a destination, apply access labels, or edit/update the audience.

Selecting Activate to destination lets you activate the audience to a destination. For more detailed information on activating an audience to a destination, please read the activation overview.

Selecting Apply access labels lets you manage the access labels that belong to the audience. For more information on access labels, please read the documentation on managing labels.

Selecting Edit properties will let you edit the basic details of the audience, such as the name, description, and tags.

Audience total

The Audience total section shows the total number of profiles that qualify for the audience.

Estimates are generated by using a sample size of that day’s sample data. If there are less than 1 million entities in your profile store, the full data set is used; for between 1 and 20 million entities, 1 million entities are used; and for over 20 million entities, 5% of the total entities are used. More information about generating estimates can be found in the estimate generation section of the audience creation tutorial.

Activated destinations

The Activated destinations section shows the destinations that this audience is activated for.

Profile samples

Underneath is a sampling of profiles that qualify for the segment, detailing information including the Profile ID, first name, last name, and personal email.

The way data sampling gets triggered depends on the method of ingestion.

For batch ingestion, the profile store is automatically scanned every fifteen minutes to see if a new batch was successfully ingested since the last sampling job was run. If that is the case, the profile store is subsequently scanned to see if there’s been at least a 5% change in the number of records. If these conditions are met, a new sampling job is triggered.

For streaming ingestion, the profile store is automatically scanned every hour to see if there’s been at least a 5% change in the number of records. If this condition is met, a new sampling job is triggered.

The sample size of the scan depends on the overall number of entities in your profile store. These sample sizes are represented in the following table:

More detailed information about each Profile can be seen by selecting the Profile ID. To learn more about a profile’s details, please read the Real-Time Customer Profile user guide.

Creating an audience

You can select Create audience to create an audience.

A popover appears, letting you choose between composing an audience or building rules.

Audience Composition

Selecting Compose audiences takes you to Audience Composition. This workspace provides intuitive controls for building and editing audiences, such as drag-and-drop tiles used to represent different actions. To learn more about creating audiences, please read the Audience Composition guide.

Segment Builder

Selecting Build rule takes you to the Segment Builder. This workspace provides intuitive controls for building and editing segment definitions, such as drag-and-drop tiles used to represent data properties. To learn more about creating segment definitions, please read the Segment Builder guide

Importing an audience

You can select Import audience to import an externally generated audience.

The Import audience CSV workflow appears. You can select a CSV file to import as an externally generated audience.

After selecting the CSV file to import, a list of sample data is shown for this externally generated audience. After confirming that the sample data is correct, select Next.

The Audience details page appears. You can add information about your audience, including its name, description, primary identity, and identity namespace value.

After filling in your audience details, select Next.

The Review page is displayed. You can review the details of your newly imported externally generated audience.

After confirming the details are correct, select Finish to import your externally generated audience into Adobe Experience Platform.

Scheduled segmentation

Once audiences have been created, you can then evaluate them through on-demand or scheduled (continuous) evaluation. Evaluation means moving Real-Time Customer Profile data through segment jobs in order to produce corresponding audiences. Once created, the audiences are saved and stored so that they can be exported using Experience Platform APIs.

On-demand evaluation involves using the API to perform evaluation and build audiences as needed, whereas scheduled evaluation (also known as ‘scheduled segmentation’) allows you to create a recurring schedule to evaluate audiences at a specific time (at a maximum, once daily).

Enable scheduled segmentation

Enabling your audiences for scheduled evaluation can be done using the UI or the API. In the UI, return to the Browse tab within Audiences and toggle on Schedule all audiences. This will cause all audiences to be evaluated based on the schedule set by your organization.

Schedules can currently only be created using the API. For detailed steps on creating, editing, and working with schedules using the API, please follow the tutorial for evaluating and accessing segmentation results, specifically the section on scheduled evaluation using the API.

Compositions

Select the Compositions tab to see a list of all the audiences generated through Audience Composition for your organization.

By default, this view lists information about the audiences including the name, status, created date, created by, last updated date, and last updated by.

You can select the icon to change which fields are displayed.

A popover appears, listing all the fields that can be displayed within the table.

To see how the audience is composed, select an audience’s name within the Audiences tab.

The Audience Composition page appears with the building blocks that compose your audience. For more details about how to use Audience Composition, please read the Audience Composition UI guide.

Streaming segmentation

Streaming segmentation is the ability to do segmentation on Platform in near real-time, while focusing on data richness. With streaming segmentation, qualification for segmentation now happens as data lands into Platform, alleviating the need to schedule and run segmentation jobs.

More information about streaming segmentation can be found in the streaming segmentation user guide.

Edge segmentation

Edge segmentation is the ability to evaluate audiences in Platform instantaneously on the edge, enabling same page and next page personalization use cases.

More information about edge segmentation can be found in the edge segmentation UI guide

Policy violations

Once you are done creating your audience, the audience will be analyzed by Adobe Experience Platform Data Governance to ensure there are no policy violations within the audience. See the Data Governance overview for more information.

Next steps and additional resources

The Segmentation Service UI provides a rich workflow allowing you to create marketable audiences from Real-Time Customer Profile data.

To learn more about Segmentation Service, please continue reading the documentation. To learn how to use the Segmentation Service API, please read the Segmentation Service developer guide.

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