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Segments & Audiences

In a broad sense, “Audience” is just a target/consumer group of people for an activity. This definition of audience is fine for spoken language but we need a more systematic way to describe how we target users. To do so we need to define some ‘aspects’ and know what aspects any given user has. This raises 2 questions:

  • What should the ‘aspects’ be that we use?
  • How do we know that any given user has specific aspects or not considering we are a Zero-Party Data Platform and do not store user data in our backend by default (as every other platform does)?

We already have the ‘aspects’ that we can associate users with: MeData Definition. Segments & Audiences are the first layer built on top of MeData.

Segments​

It is possible to create Segment Definitions based on any MeData Definition. As an example consider Country of residence MeData Definition, we can create a UK Residents segment by selecting "Country of residence" MeData Definition and providing "UK" as the segmentation value. It is clear that we can have TR Residents, US Residents and so forth based on this MeData. Similarly, Gender MeData Definition with "Male" value creates Males segment, and "Female" value creates Females segment.

Segment Definitons are not constrained to "EQUALS" assertions. Segment Definitions can be created using various value assertion operators in accordance with their data type. For example:

  • Country of residence EQUALS "UK" (data type: string)
  • Country of residence NOT_EQUALS "UK" (data type: string)
  • Name STARTS_WITH "D" (data type: string)
  • Age LESS_THAN 18 (data type: number)
  • Pet owner EQUALS TRUE (data type: boolean)

Segment Definitons are created and maintained in the Orchestrator.

Segment Subscriptions​

DataSapien Mobile SDK periodically checks and fetches Segment Definitions from the backend, similar to what it does for MeData Definitions.

Mobile SDK "subscribes to" or "unsubscribes from" a segment based on MeData collection. Lets continue our sample from the previous section: if "UK" was collected as the value of Country of residence MeData Definition, the Mobile SDK automatically subscribes to UK Residents segment. When that changes and a different value is collected (say because user changes his locale settings and we happened to define Country of residence to be collected via that source), Mobile SDK unsubscribes from UK Residents and subscribes to the new one if there is a matching Segment Definition.

tip

Segment Definitions require carefull consideration similar to MeData Definitions and DataSapien provides consultancy and a thorough analysis of your data journey to assist with this. Contact us.

Audience Definitions​

Audiences are logical combinations of Segment Definitions. In other words; an Audience is a named combination of 'Segments'.

Primary use case of Audiences is determining the target user group for Journeys & Exchanges. With Mobile SDK instances subscribed to their related Segments, platform is now capable of finding specific users for a given Audience by calculating combination of segment membership.

Audience Feasibility​

Being a Zero-Party Data Platform makes it harder for the platform to count users exactly for a given Audience. There are Segment subscriptions but a user may be inactive for a long period of time or even delete the app in which case there will be 'stale' subscriptions. To address this there are special Segment Definitions introduced by the system:

  • Last 1 day active
  • Last 7 days active
  • Last 28 days active
  • Last 84 days active

The Mobile SDK subscribes to these at every possibility and these subscriptions are deleted automatically by the DataSapien Mobile Backend after the number of specified days.

Info

This mechanism allows us to have a rough - but accurate enough in terms of statistics - number of available users in any given Audience.