Adobe Experience Platform: outdated sample profiles
The article addresses outdated sample profiles in Adobe Experience Platform, which can cause inaccurate audience profiles. The solution includes understanding the refresh cycle, setting up daily exports, using Query Service for current data, and considering infrastructure implications to ensure accurate audience profiles.
Description
Environment
- Adobe Experience Platform
- Version/Constraints: Applicable to environments where sample profiles are used for audience segmentation.
Issue/Symptoms
Sample profiles displayed in the Audience Summary may be outdated. This can result in:
- Sample profiles are several days old and do not follow the current segment definition.
- Inaccurate representation of current segment criteria, such as showing customers with a birthday on an incorrect date.
For instance, if a segment is built with the criterion customer’s birthday today the sample profiles might show birthdays from days ago instead of today’s date. This makes it difficult to validate audience builds effectively.
Resolution
To address this issue and ensure that sample profiles are up-to-date:
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Understand the current refresh cycle. Sample profiles are managed by the sample job that runs as data is ingested into Experience Platform. The sample job updates the profiles if the records ingested change the count by ±5%, and automatically updates every seven days, regardless of the count % change. The refresh cycle does not affect actual segmentation but only updates the display of sample profiles.
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Set up a daily export of your audience post-segmentation job to an SFTP or S3 connection to get an accurate representation of your segment population. For more details, please refer to Activate Batch Profile Destinations.
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Use Query Service to retrieve current profile data based on specific segment membership criteria. Example query structure (basic query which can then be fine-tuned based on your own data):
SELECT * FROM profile_snapshot_export_ID WHERE segmentMembership[ 'ups'] [ '[ segmentID] '] is not null AND segmentMembership[ 'ups'] [ '[ segmentID] '] .status = 'realized'
You can retrieve the above profile_snapshot_export_ID from the System datasets within the UI using filtering options available under the Datasets section. For steps, refer to System-generated datasets in the Experience Platform Dashboards Guide.
4. Consider the performance implications. Refreshing samples for all clients/sandboxes is currently based on the above 5% rule or a weekly automatic update. This remains a product-fixed setting as a higher frequency may have infrastructure/performance implications.
By following these steps, you can maintain visibility into your segments without relying on potentially stale sample profiles provided by default system settings.