Engage Audiences Overview

Audiences let you group users or accounts based on event behavior and traits that Segment tracks.

You can build Audiences from core tracking events, traits, and computed traits. You can then sync Audiences to hundreds of Destinations or access them with the Profile API.

Building an Audience

You can build an Audience from existing events, traits, computed traits, or other Audiences.

Events

You can build an Audience from any events connected to Engage, including Track, Page, and Screen calls. In the Audience builder, Page calls appear as Page Viewed and Screen calls appear as Screen Viewed.

To refine the audience based on event properties, use the +property button:

• The name property for Page and Screen calls appears in the Audience builder as page_name and screen_name, respectively.
• The Audience builder doesn’t return every property value in the Constant value or Traits drop-downs. Segment shows a subset of values from the incoming data stream. If you don’t see the value you’re looking for, you can manually enter it.

Select and not who to indicate users that have not performed an event. For example, you might want to look at all users that have viewed a product above a certain price point but not completed the order.

You can also specify two different types of time-windows, within and in between. The within property lets you specify an event that occurred in the last x number of days, while in between lets you specify events that occurred over a rolling time window in the past. A common use case is to look at all customers that were active 30 to 90 days ago, but have not completed an action in the last 30 days.

Building audiences with traits

You can also build audiences using Custom Traits, Computed Traits, SQL Traits, and audience memberships.

Custom Traits

Custom traits are user or account-specific attributes. You can collect these traits from your apps when a user completes a form or signs up using an Identify call. You can view these traits in the Profile explorer. Custom Traits are mutable and update to the latest value seen by the user’s Identify events.

Computed Traits

You can also use computed traits in an audience definition. For example, you can create a total_revenue computed trait and use it to generate an audience of big_spender customers that exceed a certain threshold.

SQL Traits

With SQL Traits, you can use data in your warehouse to build an audience. By running SQL queries on this warehouse data, you can import specific traits back into Segment to enhance both Segment audiences and the data you send to downstream destinations.

Audience memberships

When you build an audience based on audience membership, you use existing audiences as criteria for creating new audiences. You can include or exclude profiles based on their membership in other audiences, allowing you to generate more specific audience segments.

Time comparison

You can use the following time comparison operators in your audience definition:

• before date
• after date
• within last
• within next
• before last
• after next

Only ISO timestamps can be used with these operators. Additionally, these time comparison operators exclusively apply to custom traits. If the timestamp is not a valid ISO timestamp (for example, a trailing Z is missing), Segment won’t process the audience in real-time. Learn more about real-time compute compared to batch.

Note: Timezones seen in the UI are based on your local timezone, but are converted to UTC on the backend.

Funnel Audiences

Funnel audiences allow you to specify strict ordering between two events. This might be the case if you want an event to happen or not happen within a specific time window, as in the following example:

Dynamic property references

Dynamic Property references give you more flexibility over funnel audiences. Instead of specifying a constant value in both events, like product_id = 123 for both Product Viewed and Order Completed events, you can specify that a child event references an event property of a parent event. You can also compare an event property to a trait variable.

Account-level audiences

If you have a B2B business, you might want to build an Audience of accounts. You can use both account-level traits that you’ve sent through the Group call, or user-level traits and events. For example, you might want to re-engage a list of at-risk accounts defined as companies which are on a business tier plan and where none of the users in that account have logged in recently. When incorporating user-level events or traits, you can specify None of the users, Any users, or All users.

See Account-level Audiences for more information.

Send audiences to destinations

You can send audiences and computed traits to third-party services in Segment’s Destinations catalog.

For step-by-step instructions on how to connect an audience to a destination, see Send Audience Data to Destinations.

Understanding compute times

Because a number of factors (like system load, backfills, or user bases) determine the complexity of an Audience, some compute times take longer than others.

As a result, Segment recommends waiting at least 24 hours for an Audience to finish computing before you resume working with the Audience.

From the Overview page, you can view Audience details including the current compute status and a progress bar for real-time and batch Audiences. Engage updates the progress bar and status for real-time computations approximately every 10 minutes.

Refresh real-time Audiences and Traits

For real-time computations, you can click Refresh Audience or Refresh Trait to update user counts, status, and compute progress.

Compute statuses

Engage displays the following compute statuses for Audiences and Traits.

Real-time computations

Batch computations

Real-time compute compared to batch

Real-time Compute allows you to update traits and Audiences as Segment receives new events. Real-time Compute unlocks exciting use cases:

• Intra-Session App Personalization: change your app experience with personalized onboarding, product recommendations, and faster funnels based on a user entering and exiting an audience.
• Instant Messaging: Trigger messages in email, live chat, and push notifications instantly, to deliver immediate experiences across channels.
• Operational Workflows: Supercharge your sales and support teams by responding to customer needs faster, based on the latest understanding of a user.

To create a new Audience or Trait:

1. Go to your Computed Traits or Audiences tab in Engage and select Create.

2. Configure and preview your Audience or Trait.
   • A lightning bolt next to Realtime Enabled indicates that the computation updates in real-time.
   • By default, Segment queries all historical data to set the current value of the computed trait and Audience. Backfill computes historical data up to the point of audience creation. You can uncheck Include Historical Data to compute values for the Audience or trait without historical data. With backfill disabled, the trait or Audience only uses the data that arrives after you create it.
3. Select destinations to connect, then review and create your Audience or Trait.

While Engage is computing, use the Audience Explorer to see users or accounts that enter your Audience. Engage displays the Audience as computing in the Explorer until at least one user or account enters.

Editing Realtime Audiences and Traits

Engage supports the editing of realtime Audiences and Traits, which allows you to make nuanced changes to existing Traits and Audiences in situations where cloning or building from scratch may not suit your use case.

To edit a realtime Trait or Audience, follow these steps:

1. In your Engage Space, select the Computed Traits or Audiences tab.
2. Select the realtime Audience or Trait you want to edit.
3. Select the Builder tab and make your edits.
4. Preview the results, then select Create Audience to confirm your edits.

Engage then processes your realtime Audience or Trait edits. While the edit task runs, the audience remains locked and you can’t make further changes. Once Engage incorporates your changes, you’ll be able to access your updated Audience or Trait.

Monitor the health of your Audience syncs

Use Segment’s Delivery Overview and Alerting features to monitor the health of your Audience syncs and get notifications when event volume spikes or drops.

Delivery Overview

Delivery Overview is a visual observability tool designed to help Segment users diagnose event delivery issues for any event-streaming destination receiving events from Engage Audiences.

Delivery Overview has three core features:

• Pipeline view: A visual overview of each step your data takes during the delivery process - from when your audiences outputs events to when events are successfully delivered to your connected destination.
• Breakdown table: If you select a step in the pipeline view, you can see more details about the events that were processed at each pipeline step.
• Discard table: If you select an event in a breakdown table, you can see more details about the events that failed or were filtered out of your process. You can also inspect samples of the discarded events.

For more information about the breakdown and discard tables, see the Delivery Overview documentation.

To view Delivery Overview for an Audience:

1. From your Segment workspace’s home page, navigate to Engage > Audiences.
2. Find an Audience, click the (…) menu, and select Delivery Overview.
3. On the Delivery Overview page, select the Audience dropdown to filter by a specific Audience, select the Date range dropdown to filter by a specific time period, or use the Show metrics toggle to view your metrics as percentages.

Steps in the pipeline view

By default, Segment displays Delivery Overview information for all Audiences connected to your destination. You can filter your Delivery Overview pipeline view by an individual Audience for more granular data.

You can also further refine the data displayed on the pipeline view using the time picker and the metric toggle, located under the destination header. With the time picker, you can specify a time period (last 10 minutes, 1 hour, 24 hours, 7 days, 2 weeks, or a custom date range over the last two weeks) for which you’d like to see data. With the metric toggle, you can switch between seeing metrics represented as percentages (for example, 85% of events or a 133% increase in events) or as counts (13 events or an increase of 145 events.) Delivery Overview shows percentages by default.

Audiences have the following steps in the pipeline view:

• Events that Segment created for your activation^*: The number of events for each compute depends on the changes detected in your audience membership.
• Filtered at source: Events discarded by Protocols: either by the schema settings or Tracking Plans.
• Filtered at destination: If any events aren’t eligible to be sent (for example, due to destination filters, insert function logic, and so on), Segment displays them at this step.
• Events pending retry: A step that reveals the number of events that are awaiting retry. Unlike the other steps, you cannot click into this step to view the breakdown table.
• Failed delivery: Events that Segment attempted to deliver to your destination, but that ultimately failed to be delivered. Failed delivery might indicate an issue with the destination, like invalid credentials, rate limits, or other error statuses received during delivery.
• Successful delivery: Events that Segment successfully delivered to your destination. You’ll see these events in your downstream integrations.

^*The “Events from audience” step is currently only available for Linked Audiences.

Alerting

Create alerts related to the performance and throughput of Audience syncs and receive in-app, email, and Slack notifications when event volume fluctuations occur.

To access Audience alerting, navigate to Engage > Audiences, select an Audience, and click the Alerts tab.

On the Alerts tab, you can create new alerts and view all active alerts for this connection. You can only edit or delete the alerts that you create, unless you have the Workspace Owner role.

Activation event health spikes or drops

You can create an Activation event health spikes or drops alert that notifies you when events sent from your audience to a downstream destination have failures to a destination above a certain threshold. For example, if you set a change percentage of 4% and your destination received 100 events from your Audience over the first 24 hours, Segment would notify you the following day if your destination ingested fewer than 96 or more than 104 events.

To create an Activation event health spikes or drops alert:

1. From your Segment workspace’s home page, navigate to Engage > Audiences.
2. Select the Audience you want to create an alert for, select the Alerts tab, and click Create alert.
3. On the Create alert sidesheet, select the destination for which you’d like to monitor event health.
4. Enter a percentage threshold to trigger activation event health notifications.
5. Select one or more of the following alert channels:
   • Email: Select this to receive notifications at the provided email address.
   • Slack: Select this to send alerts to one or more channels in your workspace.
   • In-app: Select this to receive notifications in the Segment app. To view your notifications, select the bell next to your user icon in the Segment app.
6. Click Save.

To make changes to an Activation event health spikes or drops alert, select the icon in the Actions column for the alert and click Edit.

To delete a Activation event health spikes or drops alert, select the icon in the Actions column for the alert and click Delete.

Access your Audiences using the Profiles API

You can access your Audiences using the Profile API by querying the /traits endpoint. For example, you can query for high_value_user property with the following GET request:

https://profiles.segment.com/v1/spaces/<workspace_id>/collections/users/profiles/email:alex@segment.com/traits?limit=100&include=high_value_user

The query would return the following payload:

    {
        "traits": {
            "high_value_user": true
        },
        "cursor": {
            "url": "",
            "has_more": false,
            "next": "",
            "limit": 100
        }
    }

You can read the full Profile API docs to learn more.

Download your Audience as a CSV file

You can download a copy of your Audience by visiting the Audiences overview page.

1. Navigate to Engage > Audiences.
2. Select the Audience you’d like to download as a CSV, then click Download CSV.
3. Select the data fields that you’d like to include in your CSV as columns.
   • Your CSV will contain all users in this audience with the selected fields. You can filter by External ID, SQL trait, Computed Trait, and Custom Trait.
4. Click Next.
5. Before you can download the CSV, you’ll need to generate it. There are two different options for formatting:
   • Formatted: Displays external IDs and traits as distinct columns.
   • Unformatted: Contains the following columns: a user/account key, a JSON object containing the external IDs (optional, if selected), and a JSON object containing the traits (optional, if selected).
6. Click Generate CSV.

Once Segment generates the CSV, you can download the file directly. You’ll receive an email notification of the CSV completion, with a URL to the Audience overview page.

Note the following limits for the CSV downloader:

• You can’t download more than one CSV for the same audience at the same time.
• You can only generate one CSV every five minutes.
• Each CSV represents a snapshot at a given point in time that references the data from the audience’s most recent computational run. This applies to both real time and batch audiences, as the CSV is not updated in real time. To locate the snapshot’s given point of time, click on the Download CSV button, and the popup modal will contain an information icon ℹ️, which when hovered over will reveal the snapshot’s details.
  • 

Identifier Breakdown

The audience summary is a breakdown of the percentages of external_ids of users in the audience. These are the default IDs that Segment includes in the Identity resolution configuration. Segment displays the percentage of the audience with each identifier, which you can use to verify the audience size and profiles are correct. The update of identifier breakdowns on profiles doesn’t occur in real time.

FAQ

Why do I get a different user count when I use $ on a field?**

Segment recommends using the $ operator when you deal with array properties. However, the $ causes logical conditions to apply independently to each array entry independently. As a result, you’ll get more accurate results by using the equals one of condition:

How do I populate multiple items off a list for an equals one of condition? **

The audience builder accepts CSV and TSV lists.

Why am I receiving the error “The audience would create a cycle by referencing another audience”?

This error occurs when creating audiences that reference each other, meaning audience X refers to audience Y in its trigger condition, and later you attempt to modify audience Y’s trigger condition to refer back to audience X. To avoid this error, ensure that the audiences do not reference each other in their conditions.

How does the historical data flag work?

Including historical data lets you take past information into account. You can only exclude historical data for real-time audiences. For batch audiences, Segment includes historical data by default.