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 on 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.
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Important notes important-notes-segment-qualification
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Keep in mind that 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, the individuals belonging to this audience will 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, we therefore recommend only using 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 upload, you cannot target these audiences in an “Audience Qualification” activity. Only audiences created using segment definitions can be leveraged in this activity. -
Experience event field groups can not 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 in a journey, that audience qualification activity may take up to 10 minutes to be active and listen to profiles entering or exiting the audience.
Configure the activity cnfigure-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 Note that 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 Note that 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 is operational ten minutes after you have published 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 in journeys of individuals getting qualified or disqualified from an Adobe Experience Platform audience.
The reception speed of this information is high. Measurements made show a speed of 10 000 events received per seconds. As a result, you should make sure you understand how peaks of entrance might happen, how to avoid them and how to make your journey ready for them.
Batch audiences batch-speed-segment-qualification
When using audience qualification for a batch audience, note that a peak of entrance will happen at the time of the daily calculation. The size of the peak will depend 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 make a very large number of individuals enter the journey.
Streamed audiences streamed-speed-segment-qualification
When using audience qualification for streamed audiences, there is less risk of getting large peaks of entrances/exits due to the continuous evaluation of the audience. Still, if the audience definition leads to making a large volume of customers qualify at the same time, there might be a peak too.
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.
How to avoid overloads overloads-speed-segment-qualification
Here are a few best practices that will help to avoid overloading systems leveraged in journeys (data sources, custom actions, channel action activities).
Do not use, in an Audience Qualification activity, a batch audience immediately after its creation. It will avoid the first calculation peak. Note that there will be a yellow warning in the journey canvas if you’re about to use an audience that has never been calculated.
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, you must 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.
Before using the audience in a production journey, always evaluate first the volume of individuals qualifying for this audience every day. To do so, you can check the Audience menu, open the audience then look at the Profiles over time graph.
How-to video video
Understand the applicable use cases for audience qualification journeys. Learn how to build a journey with audience qualification and which best practices to apply.