Upload audiences into Adobe Experience Platform

Transcript

In this video we’re going to be going over the audience upload feature that’s part of reimagining audiences with an Adobe Experience platform. This exciting new feature makes it easier than ever to bring in audiences from any source, especially those outside of the Adobe ecosystem. Plug them straight in and get them going in your marketing efforts. In order to understand how this works, let’s first start by talking about how an audience is made. No matter where they come from, audiences all have the same basic construction. We start with some base data, for example data from Adobe’s real-time customer profile. Then we apply to that a segment definition. Remember this is simply an expression or a query we’re going to apply to that base data. The result is what we call an audience. That’s a group of profiles, people in this example, who all meet the criteria expressed in the segment rules. Because most marketing systems share these same basic elements, establishing audiences as a currency makes a lot of sense and provides more flexibility in how audiences are used in customer interactions. Historically, Experience platform customers have started by loading all their relevant base data into platform, constructed segment definitions, and produced audiences all within that AEP ecosystem. That’s still the right option for a lot of cases, but say you’ve got some audiences you’ve already created somewhere else, and for cost, security, or technical reasons, it just doesn’t make sense to try and redo all that work in a new system. With standardized audiences, that’s no longer necessary, and there’s an option to leave the base data and segmentation logic right where it is, and simply bring the resulting audience into Experience platform. As long as the identities for the profiles you’re bringing in have been configured for AEP, you’ll be able to activate your custom audience right alongside any audiences native to Experience platform.

Now let’s see what this looks like within the Experience platform interface. I can go to import audience, where I get the option to either select from files or just drag and drop a file straight from my machine. When the upload starts, I get a quick preview of the file that I’ve just uploaded so I can check and make sure that everything looks the way that I expect. When I hit next, the file name from this will automatically populate in the audience name. I can change that at a description, but the two most important fields here are to tell the system which column contains the ID and what kind of ID that is. I’ve got some advanced options I can look through, or I can just say next from here. I get a nice preview of what I’ve done with all the audience metadata, some sample rows so I can make sure everything looks like I want, and then I can click finish. And just like that, the audience metadata gets published and is ready to be combined, refined, or even used as is. The underlying data, of course, will take a little bit of time to get ingested, but that process has already started and I don’t have to wait for it to continue my work. I can also click into the audience details to get more information about how the ingestion is going, the current status, and the data set and batches associated with this audience. Here are a few things you’re going to want to keep in mind as you use this feature. First of all, there’s a 1 gigabyte file limit from the UI. We’re working on an S3 connector for bigger files, but that’ll be coming later. When you upload your files, make sure you’ve got less than 10 columns. You shouldn’t need that many anyway, because additional columns should not be durable profile attributes like first name, last name, etc. They should really be temporary contextual data used for personalization. In our example, that was things like the flight number, the cancellation date, the weather at the time, can also be promo codes or any other personalization that’s specific to the audience. When you upload an audience, you can augment existing profiles or create new ones, depending on whether or not that ID has been seen before by the profile service. So be aware of it, that might affect your organization’s profile counts and richness. Finally, this is not yet available as is for AGO campaigns or journeys, but should work great for all RTCDP destinations. We hope this video has given you a glimpse into the exciting new capabilities coming with this audience upload feature within Adobe Experience Platform. Thanks for watching.