Audience Qualification events segment-qualification
About audience qualification events about-segment-qualification
This activity allows your journey to listen to the entrances and exits of profiles in Adobe Experience Platform audiences in order to make individuals enter or move forward in a journey. For more information about audience creation, refer to this section.
Let’s say you have a “silver customer” audience. With this activity, you can make all new silver customers enter a journey and send them a series of personalized messages.
This type of event can be positioned as the first step or later in the journey.
➡️ Discover this feature in video
Configure the activity configure-segment-qualification
To configure the Audience Qualification activity, follow these steps:
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Unfold the Events category and drop an Audience Qualification activity into your canvas.
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Add a Label to the activity. This step is optional.
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Click in the Audience field and select the audiences you want to leverage.
note note NOTE You can customize the columns displayed in the list and sort them. 
Once the audience is added, the Copy button allows you to copy its name and ID:
{"name":"Loyalty membership","id":"8597c5dc-70e3-4b05-8fb9-7e938f5c07a3"}
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In the Behaviour field, choose whether you want to listen to audience entrances, exits or both.
note note NOTE Enter and Exit correspond to the Realized and Exited audience participation statuses from Adobe Experience Platform. For more on how to evaluate an audience, refer to the Segmentation Service documentation. -
Select a namespace. This is only needed if the event is positioned as the first step of the journey. By default, the field is pre-filled with the last used namespace.
note note NOTE You can only select a people-based identity namespace. If you have defined a namespace for a lookup table (for example: ProductID namespace for a Product lookup), it will not be available in the Namespace dropdown list. 
The payload contains the following context information, which you can use in conditions and actions:
- the behavior (entrance, exit)
- the timestamp of qualification
- the audience id
When using the expression editor in a condition or action that follows an Audience Qualification activity, you have access to the AudienceQualification node. You can choose between the Last qualification time and the status (enter or exit).
See Condition activity.
A new journey that includes an Audience Qualification event becomes operational ten minutes after you publish it. This time interval corresponds to the cache refresh interval of the dedicated service. Therefore, you must wait ten minutes before using this journey.
Best practices best-practices-segments
The Audience Qualification activity enables the immediate entrance into journeys of individuals getting qualified or disqualified from an Adobe Experience Platform audience.
The reception speed of this information is high. Measurements show a speed of 10,000 events received per second. As a result, ensure you understand how peaks of entrance might happen, how to avoid them, and how to make your journey ready for them. Learn more about journey processing rates and throughput limits in this section.
Batch audiences batch-speed-segment-qualification
When using Audience Qualification for a batch audience, note that a peak of entrance occurs at the time of the daily calculation. The size of the peak depends on the number of individuals entering (or exiting) the audience daily.
Moreover, if the batch audience is newly created and immediately used in a journey, the first batch of calculation might cause a very large number of individuals to enter the journey.
Streamed audiences streamed-speed-segment-qualification
When using Audience Qualification for streamed audiences, there is less risk of large peaks of entrances/exits due to the continuous evaluation of the audience. However, if the audience definition leads to a large volume of customers qualifying simultaneously, a peak might still occur.
Avoid using open and send events with streaming segmentation. Instead, use real user-activity signals like clicks, purchases, or beacon data. For frequency or suppression logic, use business rules rather than send events. Learn more
For more information on streaming segmentation, refer to Adobe Experience Platform documentation.
Why not all qualified profiles may enter the journey streaming-entry-caveats
When using streaming audiences with the Audience Qualification activity, not all profiles that qualify for the audience will necessarily enter the journey. This behavior can occur due to:
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Profiles already in the audience: Only profiles that newly qualify for the audience after the journey is published will trigger entry. Profiles already in the audience before publishing will not enter.
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Journey activation time: When you publish a journey, the Audience Qualification activity takes up to 10 minutes to become active and start listening for profile entries and exits. Learn more about journey activation.
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Quick exits from audience: If a profile qualifies for the audience but exits before the journey entry is triggered, that profile may not enter the journey.
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Timing between qualification and journey processing: Due to the distributed nature of Adobe Experience Platform, there may be timing gaps between when a profile qualifies for an audience and when the journey processes that qualification event.
Recommendations:
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After publishing a journey, wait at least 10 minutes before sending events or data that will trigger profile qualification. This ensures the journey is fully activated and ready to process entries.
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For critical use cases where you need to ensure all qualified profiles enter, consider using a Read Audience activity instead, which processes all profiles in an audience at a specific time.
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Monitor your journey’s entry rate and throughput to understand profile flow patterns.
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If profiles are not entering as expected, refer to the troubleshooting guide for additional diagnostic steps.
How to avoid overloads overloads-speed-segment-qualification
Here are a few best practices to avoid overloading systems leveraged in journeys (data sources, custom actions, channel action activities):
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Do not use a batch audience immediately after its creation in an Audience Qualification activity. This avoids the first calculation peak. A yellow warning appears in the journey canvas if you are about to use an audience that has never been calculated.
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Put in place a capping rule for data sources and actions used in journeys to avoid overloading them. Learn more in Journey Orchestration documentation. Note that the capping rule has no retry. If you need to retry, use an alternative path in the journey by checking the box Add an alternative path in case of a timeout or an error in conditions or actions.
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Before using the audience in a production journey, evaluate the volume of individuals qualifying for this audience daily. To do so, check the Audience menu, open the audience, and look at the Profiles over time graph.
Learn more about entry rate limits and throughput in this section.
Guardrails and limitations audience-qualification-guardrails
Follow the guardrails and recommendations below to build Audience Qualification journeys. See also Audience Qualification best practices.
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Audience Qualification journeys are primarily designed to work with streaming audiences. This combination guarantees a better real-time experience. It is strongly recommended to use streaming audiences in the Audience Qualification activity.
However, if you want to use batch ingestion-based attributes in your streaming audience or a batch audience for an Audience Qualification journey, consider the time span for audience evaluation/activation. A batch audience or streaming audience using batch-ingested attributes becomes ready for use in the Audience Qualification activity approximately 2 hours after the completion of your segmentation job. This job runs once a day at the time defined by your Adobe Organization administrator.
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Adobe Experience Platform audiences are calculated either once a day (batch audiences) or in real-time (for streamed audiences, using the High Frequency Audiences option of Adobe Experience Platform).
- If the selected audience is streamed, individuals belonging to this audience potentially enter the journey in real-time.
- If the audience is batch, people newly qualified for this audience will potentially enter the journey when the audience calculation is executed on Adobe Experience Platform.
As a best practice, use streaming audiences in a Audience Qualification activity. For batch use cases, please use a Read audience activity.
note note NOTE Due to the batch nature of audiences created using composition workflows and custom uploads, these audiences cannot be targeted in an “Audience Qualification” activity. Only audiences created using segment definitions can be leveraged in this activity. -
Experience event field groups cannot be used in journeys starting with a Read Audience, an Audience Qualification or a Business Event activity.
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When using an Audience Qualification activity in a journey, that activity may take up to 10 minutes to be active and listen to profiles entering or exiting the audience.
How-to video video
Understand the applicable use cases for Audience Qualification journeys in this video. Learn how to build a journey with Audience Qualification and which best practices to apply.