Create an audience

In today’s digital age, businesses have access to an enormous amount of data, and using that data can be a challenge. That’s where audiences come in. An audience is a group of users and visitors who share common attributes or behaviors relevant to your business. In Customer Data Platform (CDP), creating audiences can help you better understand your customers and shape campaigns around their needs and interests. This not only improves your remarketing efforts and reduces the cost of ads but also enhances the customer experience, increases conversions and revenue, and builds stronger and better customer relationships.

In this article, we’ll show you how to create an audience and how to use it later.

Before you start

Here are some important things to keep in mind before you start:

• Audiences start collecting profile data after they are created or edited. They don’t use historical data.
• You can enrich user profiles by importing data from third-party tools, like CRMs, support platforms, email marketing tools and so on. Read more
• Segment-based audiences may be missing some dimensions from Analytics because audiences use real-time data and can only include dimensions collected before the session ends.

Create an audience

To create an audience, follow these steps:

1. Go to Menu > Customer Data Platform.
2. Navigate to Audiences.
3. Click Add an audience.
4. Now you can pick one of the following options:
   • Suggested audience: You can choose it and then tailor it to your needs.
   • Existing audience: You can copy an existing audience and then adjust it the way you want.
   • Analytics segments: You can select an existing segment and then build an audience based on it. Just note that not all segment conditions will be available in CDP because audiences use real-time data and can only include dimensions collected before the session ends.
   • Create custom audience: You can build your audience from scratch.

   

5. Name your audience and add a description.
6. Set the membership duration. The membership duration determines how long a visitor or user can stay in the audience after they become inactive (don’t perform any events) or no longer meet the set conditions.

   

   Note: The maximum membership duration is 540 days.
   
   Example: The membership duration is set to 30 days. If a user hasn’t met the audience conditions during this time, they will be removed from the audience. Even if a user has met the conditions, they will still be removed from the audience if they haven’t been active (hasn’t performed any event) for the past 30 days.

7. Set the conditions for your audience. Example: Users who haven’t signed up for our product and are using an Apple device.

   

   Note: Some user attributes can be Last  or First. Attribute values can change over time. Last means it’s the most recent detected value, and First means it’s the first detected value.

8. We’ll show you the estimated number of profiles in your audience. We estimate this number based on the latest 7-day dataset from Analytics. However, profile data will be collected once this audience is created and historical data won’t be used.

   

   Note: If you’re using attributes that aren’t available as dimensions in Analytics, the estimated value will be 0.

9. Click Create.
10. Well done! Your audience is ready and will now start collecting profile data.
11. In the next step you can:
    • Activate your data for Microsoft Teams, Slack, Mailchimp, Zapier, Power Automate, Tray.io, n8n, Make, Google Ads Customer Match or create a custom activation.
    • Use this audience in a trigger in Tag Manager.
    • Use this audience in an audience detection (CDP) trigger in Tag Manager.

User attributes and event dimensions

User attributes are dimensions that describe a user or visitor, such as device, location, traffic source and so on. When you set up a session custom dimension, it’s automatically available in CDP as a custom attribute.

Event dimensions describe the behavior of users or visitors, such as the page URL they visited, the custom event they performed or the goal they completed. It’s important to note that event dimensions in CDP rely on real-time data, which means they can only include dimensions that have been collected before the session ends. By using event dimensions, you can build targeted audiences based on visitor behavior.

Here’s a list comparing analytics dimensions with event dimensions and user attributes in CDP.

Session

Event

User

Traffic

Device & platform

Location

Website performance

Consent

Ecommerce

Custom dimension

Custom variable

Google Search Console

Google Ads

SharePoint

About profiles

CDP collects information from visitors who come to your site and combine it into profiles. A profile is like a description of a person and includes things that can identify them, such as a user ID, visitor ID or cookie ID. It also includes information that describes them, like what type of device they use, where they are located, and how they found your site.

When CDP recognizes a user ID, the person is labeled as a user in their profile. If there is no user ID detected, they are labeled as a visitor instead.

To view a visitor’s or user’s profile, follow these steps:

1. Go to Menu > Customer Data Platform.
2. Navigate to Audiences.
3. Pick the audience you want to work with.
4. Click Profiles.

   

5. View profile details.