Create a segment in the Experience Platform UI

In this video, we’ll introduce you to the new segment builder in Adobe Experience Platform. This groundbreaking tool gives you the power to build segment rules, apply them to your real-time customer profiles, and produce the audiences you need to power your customer experiences. After watching this short video, you should be ready to dive in and start using this powerful, intuitive experience to create your own segments. First, a little context. As your data comes in from various sources such as analytics, target, your own home grown systems and third parties, Adobe combines these various profile fragments using identity graph into a consolidated single customer view, the real-time customer profile. The segments we build will be applied to these profiles to form audiences. We’ll start at the home screen for Adobe Experience Platform. Front and center, you see an interactive guided workflow to help you to find the schemas, prepare and bring in your data, and configure your real-time customer profiles. In this demo work, we’ve done that prep work already and have just over 300 profiles ready for segmentation. When I navigate to segments on the left, the first thing you’ll see is the list of segments which have been created in the organization. Let’s build a new one. This is the segment builder. The workspace is divided into three key areas. Our building blocks on the left, the canvas in the center, and the inspector panel on the right. Just as our little coach mark here shows, building a segment is as easy as grabbing building blocks from the left rail and dropping 'em in the center canvas. Our primary building blocks are attributes, events and segments, and we will go through how each of these is used. On the right, we have the inspector rail. This is where we give our new segment a name and description. Let’s start off with a simple segment of people with a home address in California. Since address is an attribute, I’ll look for it in the attributes pane. If I’m familiar with my company schema, I can navigate it or if I’d rather, I can simply search for the field in question, which is state. Then I just drag and drop and set the state equal to California.

Here, you can see I’ve got about 12 profiles who qualify for the segment and if I want to, I can view a handful of these profiles to make sure I’m seeing what I expect. Let’s add another attribute while we’re here, say, email address. In adding this second attribute, I have some latitude on where it lands in the canvas. I can drop it onto the first rule to create a group or compare it to or it can add it underneath. I’ll choose that option for now. As you’d expect, I’ve got some logic I can use to connect the two rules, but see how we have both work and personal email addresses? I can take this second address field, drop it on the first to create a new group, and then I can choose whether to include any or all of these grouped rules. If I’m happy with this definition, I can give it a name, add an optional description and save my segment.

Now let’s look at event-based segments. Here, you’ll find a wonderfully intuitive event canvas based on event chains.

Just like before, I can choose an event such as add to cart and drop it into the canvas. If I’m looking for a sequence of events, I can simply bring them in and drop them into the canvas in the order I’m expecting them, and just like that, I have a segment that captures a customer journey. I can also exclude people who completed this journey by purchasing to get to the ones just a step away. I can add time windows to the whole event chain, say, last 30 days. To the individual events or even add time windows between the events themselves.

I can add conditions to specify what I’m looking for on the given event. For example, let’s say I’m looking for people who added some specific product lines to their cart.

I can pull up the product name and include that field in the cart addition event. Narrowing my results to only people who added either yoga or Lumaflex products to their cart. As segment rules become more complex, the natural language readout of my segment becomes helpful as well. But what if I don’t care about the order of events? Maybe I don’t care whether a person adds a product to their cart or picks up where they left off with their previous cart contents.

In that case, I can stack this event tile vertically and specify the logic there. I can look for both of these events in any order or either one, it’s as simple as that. Now we’ve talked about attributes and events separately so far, but I can also build segments which combine both. You see, the attributes and events canvases expand and collapse to optimize the working space. To show you what a combination segment looks like, we could just add both attribute and event rules from the left rail, but let’s have some fun and combine the two segments we just built. To do this, I’ll go to the segments tab, and drag in that first segment. When I do this, the UI reads the segment, copies the logic, and inserts it into my canvas. Now we’ll do the same thing with the second, and just like that, I have a new combination segment utilizing both attributes and events. Remember, Experience Platform is built on top of a robust set of APIs, which enables segment info like this to be used wherever you need it, even outside the Adobe Ecosystem. So we walked you through some of the basics of the new segment building experience. You should now feel comfortable diving in and building your own segments on top of the real-time customer profile in Adobe Experience Platform. Thanks for watching.