Understanding Signals

Last update: April 4, 2021

Signals are the smallest unit of information within Audience Manager. They represent user interactions or user activity on your on-line properties, and get passed on to Audience Manager to be used in trait rules.

Audience Manager uses key-value pairs to represent signals. For instance, the following signal could indicate that a visitor has reached a web page containing electronics:

  • page = electronics

The Signals Dashboard shows you multiple types of signal attributes that you can use to create new traits. Here’s a detailed view of the available signal properties:

  • Key-value pair shows you the key-value pair of the signal received by Audience Manager.

  • Signal type describes the category of each signal. Signals fall into one of the following categories:

    • Actionable log files: real-time signals received from your media performance log files;
    • Adobe Analytics: real-time signals received from your Adobe Analytics account;
    • General on-line data: real-time data generated by your audience activity and not included in actionable log files and Adobe Analytics;
    • On-boarded records: data received through batch data transfers.

  • Signal Source depends on the signal type:

    • For on-boarded signals, the signal source is the data source name.
    • For signals originating from Adobe Analytics, the data source will always be a report suite.
    • For actionable log files and general on-line data, no signal source information is displayed.

  • Total Counts shows you the total number of times a real-time signal was received by Audience Manager in the past 7 days.

  • Included in Traits shows you whether the signal is part of any trait. Click the arrow to see the traits that include the corresponding signal. For signals that are not part of any trait, the column value changes to Create Onboarded Trait or Create Rule-Based Trait.

Signal Data Refresh Frequency

Due to the large amount of data that Audience Manager processes on a daily basis, Data Explorer refreshes the displayed signal data at fixed time intervals, depending on the signal type:

  • Real-time signal data (actionable log files, Adobe Analytics data, and general on-line data) is refreshed every 4 to 6 hours.
  • On-boarded signal data is refreshed every 24 hours.

Signals, Traits, and Segments

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