About audiences

Tealium AudienceStream CDP Audiences provides a streamlined and powerful audience management experience with the following features:

• The ability to create a set of conditions to define a dynamic, real-time audience.
• The ability to connect an audience to a connector and define triggers that determine when connectors are fired.
• The ability to save frequently used audience segments (groups of conditions) and reuse them in other audiences.

How it works

An audience is a group of visitors identified by a shared set of attributes. The conditions for an audience specify the attribute values for visitors in that audience. The more conditions you add, the more specific your audience becomes. Audiences are dynamic, meaning visitors can join or leave audiences as events come in from active visitor sessions.

The Audiences page has the following tabs:

• Audiences: Displays the list of audiences in the profile.
• Segments: Displays the list of saved segments. For more information, see Saved segments.

Audience details

When you select an audience on the Audiences page, the audience details page is displayed and has the following tabs:

• Configuration: Displays the audience conditions and lets you edit the conditions.
• Insights: Displays graphs of visitors and audience activity, refreshed every day at 12 AM UTC. The time period for the graphs can be one of the following: Today, last 7 days (7D), last 30 days (30D), last 2 months (2M), or last 3 months (3M). The default time period is 7D.
  • The Visits graph shows the number of visits in the selected time period where the visitor joined or is already part of the audience.
  • The Activity graph shows the number of visitors that left (orange bar) or joined (green bar) the audience per day. The following figure shows an example of Insights graphs:
    

    

• Activations: Displays a list of activations for the audience and lets you edit, activate, or deactivate activations.
• Functions: Displays a list of the functions that are triggered by the audience.

Potential size

The potential size of the audience is the count of visitor profiles that match the defined audience conditions. The calculated result displays the number of visitors meeting the conditions as both a number and a percentage, alongside the total number of visitors. The total visitors count is the number of visitors in your Tealium profile within your configured retention window, which includes both anonymous and stitched visitors.

Limitations

Potential audience sizing is not available when an audience is built with the following attributes:

• Visit attributes: Visit attributes are transitory and do not persist after the visitor’s session ends.
• Unsaved and unpublished attributes: Attribute values are only created, enriched, and saved to a visitor profile when the attribute configuration is saved and published. Until the save and publish process occurs, no values exist that can be queried to calculate a potential audience size.

Fill an audience

You can perform a one-time backfill of an audience from historical data for visitors who meet the audience conditions. This backfill applies to both new and existing audiences. Potential Size shows the estimated number of qualified visitors in existing data. The Fill Audience checkbox is only available after you run a potential size calculation that returns a non-zero result.

Connect the audience to at least one connector action before filling. This configuration ensures that as the audience is populated, matching visitors are automatically sent to the connectors. If no connector actions are configured for the audience, the backfill does not trigger any actions and you cannot perform it again.

Fill process

When you select Fill Audience and then save and publish the profile, the system performs a one-time backfill that adds visitors who meet the specified conditions.

Only the Joined Audience connector action trigger is activated during a fill.

Visitors who already belong to the audience are excluded from the fill to avoid unnecessary reprocessing. The fill does not trigger “left audience” events.

During a fill, attributes are not re-evaluated and audience conditions are not processed. The fill operates by looking at existing attribute values only. Filling an audience does not generate new visits or change visitor attributes from historical data.

The Audiences table displays the current fill status in the Size column. A fill can be queued, in progress, completed, or failed. When a fill is in progress, the column shows the percentage filled and the current number of visitors added to the audience.

Each audience can only be filled one time. Review the audience conditions carefully and ensure that you have configured at least one connector action for the audience before starting.

Performance

The typical fill rate is 200 visitor profiles per second, but actual speed is provided on a best-effort basis and may vary from run to run. Filling an audience may cause throttling on the platform due to the volume of visitor profiles being evaluated or the number of connector actions being queued for delivery. However, real-time evaluation of incoming events continues as a priority, so live campaigns and personalization are not interrupted.

Large fills should be planned as operational jobs that can take hours to complete. Plan audience fills ahead of deadlines and allow extra time during busy periods.

Event volume

Fill events do not count toward your contracted event volume. Fill activity is tracked on the Usage dashboard for visibility only, with no billing implications.

Monitoring progress

Track fill progress in the following ways:

• The Audiences table shows the fill percentage in the Size column.
• The audience Activity view shows how many visitors have been added.

Joined audience actions generated during filling appear in profile activity, including connector statistics and charts.

Limitations

Fill an audience is not available in the following cases:

• Audience conditions with visit attributes: Visit attributes are transitory and do not persist after the visitor’s session ends, so they cannot be re-evaluated during an audience fill. If visit attributes are used in an audience condition, the Fill Audience checkbox is unavailable.
• CloudStream deployments: Fill an audience is not supported for CloudStream.
• Unsupported regions: Fill an audience is not available in the ap-southeast-1 (Hong Kong) region or the me-central-1 (UAE) region.

Audience conditions and segments

An audience is created by defining one or more conditions using visit or visitor attributes. An audience segment is a set of conditions that can be saved and used as a building block in multiple audiences.

Segments can be layered with AND or OR logic to create an audience. You can use excluding logic to remove visitors that meet the audience conditions. Visitors that meet these audience conditions are added or removed from an audience in real-time based on user-generated events.

AND logic example

This example shows a segment for visitors who have spent over $1000 and have the Fan badge, which combines the following conditions with AND logic:

• Fan badge is assigned
• lifetime_spending is greater than 1000

OR logic example

Additional visitors can be added to an audience by combining segments with OR logic. If two segments are combined with OR logic, visitors that match the conditions for either segment are included in the audience.

This example shows a segment for visitors with the Fan badge or visitors who have spent over $500, which combines the following conditions with OR logic:

• Fan badge is assigned
• lifetime_spending is greater than 500

Excluding logic example

To exclude specific visitors from an audience, use excluding logic. For example, to create an audience of frequent visitors that have not visited in the last three days, you could combine the following conditions with excluding logic:

• Frequent visitor is assigned
• Days since last visit is less than 4

Saved segments

Saved segments can be used in multiple audiences, avoiding the need to create the same conditions for each audience. Save segments while adding conditions to an audience, as shown in the following figure:

You can also create segments on the Segments tab on the Audiences page. After you save or create a segment, it is automatically saved. Save and publish is not required. For more information, see Manage segments.

Segments are only evaluated when they are used in an audience and the audience is evaluated. Segments are not available in Data Layer Enrichment (DLE) as part of a visitor profile. Segments are used in audiences and the audiences a visitor has joined are returned as part of DLE.

Segments used in audiences cannot be edited.

Segment examples

Example 1: Audience of loyalty members who have previously purchased and have abandoned their cart

In this example, two saved segments are used to create an audience of loyalty members who have previously purchased and have abandoned their cart. The loyalty members segment has the following conditions:

The cart abandoned and have previously purchased segment has the following conditions:

The audience of loyalty members who have previously purchased and have abandoned their cart uses these two segments, as follows:

Example 2: Audience of loyalty members who have not visited in the last 60 days

This example uses the loyalty members segment from the previous example and the following segment for visitors with no visits in the last 60 days that checks to see if the Last Visit attribute is greater than 60:

The Loyalty member, no visits in last 60 days audience uses both of these segments as follows:

Favorite segments

You can save segments to your favorites on the Segments tab, which lets you filter on favorites for easy access to frequently used segments. For example:

You can filter the list of segments by Favorites and only favorite segments are displayed. For example:

Visitor retention time

Visitor retention time refers to how long Tealium AudienceStream retains visitor profiles after their last recorded activity. Each incoming event associated with a visitor profile resets the retention timer. If a visitor remains inactive for the length of the retention period, their profile is permanently deleted from the system.

Retention time is specified in two places:

• Profile Retention Time in Server-side account settings, which is set for the account and cannot be modified.

• Audience Retention Time overrides the profile retention time for a specific audience. You cannot modify this setting. Contact Tealium Support to request changes.

The retention time applied to a visitor is determined by one of the following:

• Longest audience retention time
  If the visitor is a member of multiple audiences with a retention time specified, the longest retention time is used, even if it is shorter than the profile retention time.

• Profile retention time
  If the visitor is not a member of any audiences with a retention time specified, then the profile retention time is used.

The maximum allowed profile and audience retention times are determined by your contract terms.

Example

If your account has a profile retention time of 395 days, all visitor profiles with a last event activity timestamp older than 395 days are removed from AudienceStream. This means the entire visitor profile is deleted. If that same visitor returns and triggers event activity, AudienceStream creates a new visitor profile for them.

To store visitor profiles longer than your account or profile retention period, the visitor must belong to an audience that has a longer retention time.

The following example illustrates how visitor profile retention works with audiences that have longer and shorter retention times than the profile retention time.

• Profile Retention Time: 395 days
• “Window Shopper” audience retention time: 30 days
• “VIP Purchaser (> $500)” audience retention time: 400 days