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Segments and 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 their on-edge collected MeData as defined by MeData Definitions. Segments & Audiences are the first layer built on top of MeData.

Segment Definitions​

A Segment Definition is a MeData with a certain value. It is possible to create multiple Segment Definitions based on a MeData Definition. As an example consider the Country of Residence MeData Definition, we can create an UK Residents segment by providing "UK" as the segmentation value. Likewise 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, they can be created using various value assertion operators in accordance with their MeData Definition's 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 Definitions Page.

Segment Memberships​

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

The Mobile SDK keeps track of segment memberships of the users based on their on-device collected MeData. Lets continue our sample from the previous section: when "UK" is collected as the value of Country of Residence MeData Definition, the Mobile SDK marks user as a member of UK Residents segment. When that changes and a different value is collected (say because user changes device locale settings), the Mobile SDK clears UK Residents membership and marks user as a member of matching Segment Definition for the new value if there is one.

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​

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

Lets reuse Country of Residence and Gender based segments from previous section to understand how powerfull Audiences can be. Using just those two we can create various Audiences:

  • UK Males Audience: By using "AND" logical operator: "UK Residents" AND "Males"
  • Turkey or UK Residents Audience: By using "OR" logical operator: "TR Residents" OR "UK Residents"
  • Females in Turkey or UK Audience: By using "AND" and "OR" logical operators: "Females" AND ("TR Residents" OR "UK Residents")

Primary purpose of Audiences is determining the target user group for Journeys. With users (Mobile SDK in their name) having memberships to related segments marked, the Mobile SDK is now capable of filtering incoming Journeys based on their Audience by calculating segment membership combination.

Audiences are created and maintained in the Orchestrator Audience Page.