AudienceStream is an Omnichannel customer segmentation and real-time action engine. AudienceStream takes the data that flows into EventStream and creates visitor profiles that represent the most important attributes of your customers’ engagement with your brand. These visitor profiles are segmented by shared behaviors to create audiences, sets of visitors with common traits. These audiences fuel your marketing technology stack in real-time via connectors.
This guide introduces you to Tealium AudienceStream, the application interface and the fundamental concepts of a customer data platform (CDP). Step through this guide to learn how to quickly set up a working CDP with visit and visitor attributes, a dynamic audience, and a vendor connector. You can then see it in action using live data from your site or application.
The first step in using AudienceStream is to create attributes. Attributes allow you to define the important characteristics that represent a visitor’s habits, preferences, actions, and engagement with your brand. This section will describe the two types of attributes and the different kinds of data they can store.
Once you identify your desired attributes, you will configure them with enrichments business rules that determine when and how to update the values of attributes. Each data type offers its own selection of enrichments for manipulating the attribute’s value. For example, the number attribute offers the enrichment “Increment or Decrement Number” for adding or subtracting number values.
Badges are special visitor attributes that represent interesting behavior patterns. Badges are assigned or removed from visitors based on the logic of their enrichments. This logic usually combines multiple conditions into one to capture visitor segments or sets a threshold for when a particular value is reached.
While AudienceStream primarily acts on real-time customers of your digital properties, it can also work with offline data through omnichannel imports. You can take offline data, such as in-store sales or call center activity, and correlate it to your online visitor data to complete the customer data profile.
Now that you’ve seen how to build rich customer profiles using attributes and enrichments, it’s time to review how to identify your customers through identity resolution and visitor stitching. The data we’re collecting so far is anonymous and could be fragmented across the customer’s different browsers and devices. Let’s see how we can pull this data together to create a complete profile of the customer.
The visitor ID attribute is used to identify customers using a value that is guaranteed to be unique to each customer. The value is usually set during a qualifying event – one that would only occur when a customer provides a reliable means of identification, such as registering or completing a purchase.
In this step we will show how to safely create a visitor ID attribute and introduce Audience Discovery, where we can validate the identity resolution strategy before committing to it. In this example, we will capture email addresses during user registration events based on the requirements from the previous step.
This is a critical step to ensure that our identity resolution strategy is accurate and that the attribute we’ve chosen, Email Address, is unique across our customer base. We will use Audience Discovery to sample our active customers using our new Email Address attribute. The Audience Discovery chart will display a distribution of the unique values of that attribute. If everything is working as expected, each Email Address value will only have one visitor associated with it.
In this step we will complete the identity resolution plan by creating the visitor ID attribute for Email Address and populate it with the values we are already collecting in the corresponding string attribute.
This step shows how to add a connector, configure an action, and use data mappings.
Trace is the testing and validation tool for AudienceStream. You use Trace to validate that your configuration is working properly and that connector actions are being triggered.
In this step you will use Trace to validate that all of the previous configuration is working as expected. You will get a trace ID, add it to your application (or use the Tealium Tool), perform a simple test, then inspect the logs in the Trace interface.
Before we finish, it is important to understand how the save and publish process works and how to navigate your version history. This section will explain the difference between Save, Save as, and Publish and how to view your version history.
Now that you have a basic understanding of how Tealium AudienceStream works, you are ready to move on. Each of the articles referenced below are found in the Tealium Learning Center (TLC) and contain detailed information about how to set up and configure the various components reviewed in this guide.
This article describes the installation options for Tealium AudienceStream CDP. This article is for customers that want to install Tealium AudienceStream but do not already use Tealium iQ Tag Management or Tealium EventStream API Hub.