The mParticle Audience Manager allows you to define audiences and connect them to integrations for the purpose of engaging with your users. This can be very powerful when it comes to user engagement and monetization scenarios.
There are many use cases for Audiences - here’s a couple of high-level examples.
Let’s say you want to engage with users that have recently installed your app but haven’t used your app very much. Your objective is to drive higher engagement and convert those new users to high lifetime value users. You want to accomplish this across multiple channels: push notification and email. Therefore, your audience qualification criteria is that the user has installed your app in the last 72 hours and has less than three sessions.
With Audience Manager, you can easily and visually define this audience, then configure audience integrations to push notification and email partners - in this example, let’s use Button for push and Mailchimp for email. Once you configure the respective integrations in the Audience Manager, mParticle instantiates a corresponding audience in Button and updates the corresponding email marketing list in Mailchimp. No coding is necessary.
Let’s say you want to find more users like your currently highly engaged users and run an app download campaign in Facebook against that target audience. You start by defining your highly engaged users, using whatever criteria is important to you: lifetime value metrics, session activity, event activity, or any other data points you capture.
Once your audience is defined in Audience Manager, you configure the Facebook integration and corresponding custom audiences are defined in your Facebook account. From there you can leverage those custom audiences like any other custom audience in Facebook.
In this example, because we want to target users that look like our highly engaged users, we will create a Facebook lookalike audience from our highly engaged user audience and run a Facebook app install campaign that targets that lookalike audience.
The Audiences page is accessible via the main navigation. It displays a list of your audiences, separated into Single Workspace and Multi Workspace, with metrics for each audience:
Audience Manager allows you to define audiences from any user-associated data you capture with mParticle, whether from Platform inputs or partner feeds.
When you fully instrument your app using the mParticle SDK, you are sending data from your apps to the mParticle platform. mParticle also has the ability to enrich that data stream with other data sources. For example, in addition to sending your app data you may want to send in data that is not collected in the app and have the mParticle platform match the data based upon a user identifier, and then leverage the capabilities of Audience Builder to create audiences based upon this superset of data. Examples of data sent server side might include CRM data, purchase / revenue data from other non-mobile channels, and so on. Making sure all data is captured is important for audience creation as that is the first step.
The second step in using Audience Manager is defining your segmentation and engagement strategies:
These decisions drive your implementation of Audience Manager.
When you first create an audience you must specify if it will be a single workspace or multi workspace audience. A single workspace audience includes data from a single workspace. A multi workspace audience allows you to combine data across your workspaces into a single audience definition.
To create an audience:
Select Audiences from the main navigation, and then select the Single Workspace or Multi Workspace tab, and click New Audience.
Enter the Audience Name. You also have the option to provide an External Name. If provided, the external name is forwarded to Audience connections.
This screen shows a single Workspace Audience. Clicking the Multiple Workspace Audience selection from the main navigation shows a dialog asking if you would like to switch to the Multiple Audience Workspace screen.
Now that you have created an audience, it’s time to add to the audience definition:
After you define a criteria with the real-time audience builder a number displays that represents the estimated audience size:
When the calculation is complete, you can see the estimated size for an individual criteria next to the App icon, and the estimated size of the whole audience in the Audience Details section. If there aren’t enough users in the sample data to estimate audience size, you’ll see a ~ without a number as illustrated in the example above.
To add criteria to your audience definition:
Click one of the following buttons once you have completed the definition of your audience:
The audience builder allows you to build criteria based on two sources of data:
new criteria
option in the audience builder, the following options create event-based criteria:Events
: access custom eventsEcommerce
: access ecommerce eventsCrashes
: access app crashesInstalls
: access install eventsUninstalls
: access uninstall eventsSessions
: access session eventsUpgrades
: access upgrade eventsScreen views
: access screen view eventsnew criteria
option in the audience builder, the following options create profile-based criteria:Users
: access user profile information such as user attributes, calculated attributes, current audience memberships, consent state, location, etc.Attribution
: access user install and uninstall information to build criteria based on the attributed campaign
and publisher
.As mentioned above, you can build audience criteria based on user attributes from the user profiles. These attributes can be of any data type including: numbers, strings, dates, lists, booleans, etc. All user profile data is scoped and maintained within a single workspace; In multiworkspace audiences, you can select which workspace to use by pressing the number in the top right of the criteria in the audience builder.
To build an audience criteria based on a user’s profile information, press the add criteria button and select Users to view options for user based criteria:
Audience membership
: Checking a user’s membership in other audiences. Only audiences which do not contain nested definitions can be selected. When using a standard audience membership criteria, the population starts with the real-time audience and refines from there. This criteria is not affected by standard audience expiration.Calculated attributes
: Check a users calculated attribute valueConsent
: Check a users CCPA or GDPR consent stateDevice, OS, Carrier
: Check a users device type, carrier and operating systemFirst seen
: Check the date the user was first seenLocation
: Check user locationUser and device identities
: Check the format and presence of user and device identitiesUser attributes
: Check user attributesUser attribute lists
: Check user attribute listsWhen building audiences based on string attributes, several matching rules can be applied. All matches are case insensitive.
*
represents any number of characters, ?
represents any single character. For example, “bl?e” or “b*e” would both match “blue”.There are two ways to build time-based criteria for audiences: by recency, and by date. Recency criteria define a period in time in relation to ‘now’, when the audience is actually being calculated, for example within the last 7 days
. Date criteria are based on fixed calendar dates which do not move in relation to when the audience is calculated. For example, after 09/12/18
.
Keep in mind that audiences defined using fixed calendar dates will have a shorter useful lifespan, as the audience builder only uses data from within a set range (last 30 days for most customers).
Recency-based criteria select events occurring between two moments in time, relative to ‘now’. A ‘day’ represents 24 hours, and not a calendar day. For example, consider the following criteria:
If this audience is calculated at 1:00pm on September 9th 2018, then the earliest qualifying event would occur at 1:00pm on September 3rd, and the latest qualifying event would occur at 1:00pm on September 5th.
Date-based criteria are concerned with calendar dates in UTC time and are not defined in relation to when the audience is calculated.
Before September 9th 2018
means that the latest qualifying event would occur at 11:59pm on Sepember 8th 2018 UTC. After September 9th 2018
means that the earliest qualifying event would occur at 12:00am on Sepember 9th 2018 UTC.Between September 7th 2018 and September 9th 2018
means that the earliest qualifying event occurs at 12:00am UTC on September 7th, and the latest qualifying event occurs at 11:59pm UTC on September 9th.Attribution criteria can be used to segment users who have installed your app from a specific campaign and publisher or users who have purchased or re-engaged based on an engagement campaign. There are two ways to add attribution criteria:
Attribution
and then either Install
or Uninstall
to build criteria based on the publisher
and campaign
fields from an install attribution event or uninstall attribution events. Like other profile based criteria, this is subject to profile retention limits.Events
, Attribution
and the event name to build criteria based on attribution events such as install, engagement or re-engagement events. Use the event name of attribution
to target install attribution events. This allows you to select any information included with the event as custom_attributes
. Like other event criteria, this is subject to audience event retention limits.Identity criteria allow you to segment users based on their stored identities to test existence of a given identity or write logic against the identity as a string. This criteria will still scope the audience based on the workspaces included; It will not automatically include all users in the Identity Scope. For example, if the identity scope is set at the account level and the account has 3 workspaces, an audience created in one workspace will only include users with activity in that workspace (and not the other two).
Segment users by their location these two options available under Users, Location:
Equals
: Segment users that are in a specific city, state, zip or DMA, using geolocation of the users IP address.Within
: Segment users that are within a set distance to any global city, using latitude & longitude coordinates.When using our Ecommerce events, you can easily target users that have added products to their cart, but not completed a purchase by using cart abandonment
criteria:
New criteria
-> Ecommerce
-> Shopping - Cart Level
-> Cart Abandonment
From here you can define how long to wait without seeing a purchase event to include them in this audience.
The next step is to connect the audience to an output service that can use the data. See our Integrations directory for a full list of Output options.
To add an audience output:
Find the integration you want in the Directory. You can filter the Directory to show only partners with an Audience Configuration.
Click the card for your chosen partner.
Click + Add {partner} to Setup and, from the popup dialog, select Output Audience.
Complete the Configuration Settings dialog. Each partner will require slightly different information. Some require an API Key/Secret/Token, others require you to log in from mParticle using Oauth. See the Integrations Center for details for your integration. Give the configuration a name and click Save.
You can update your configurations at any time by navigating to Setup > Outputs, and selecting Audience Configurations.
Once you have set up your Output configuration, you can connect the Audience you have defined in mParticle.
Any users that fit your audience criteria will begin to be available in the output platform. Some integrations take longer than others for this to happen. See the documentation for your specific integration for details.
When mParticle forwards an audience to an Output, we are only sending identities. mParticle is capable of collecting many types of identities for both devices and users, but most Audience partners will only accept the limited set of identity types that they actually use. For example, a partner that handles email marketing may only accept email addresses, a push messaging partner may only accept push tokens, and a mobile advertising platform may only accept device advertising identifiers (IDFA for iOS and GAID for Android).
When building your audiences in mParticle, you don’t have to worry too much about this. You can simply define your matching criteria, and mParticle will forward to each Output as many available identities for each matching user as that partner accepts.
You define a set of audience criteria in the mParticle Audience Builder. mParticle finds 100 matching profiles.
All profiles include one Apple Advertising ID (IDFA), but only 65 include one email address.
You create connections to two Outputs: Partner A accepts IDFA and GAID identity types. Partner B accepts only the email identity type.
It’s not necessary for you to know which profiles have which identity types. mParticle simply forwards the 100 available IDFAs to Partner A, and the 65 available email addresses to Partner B.
mParticle creates audiences by comparing your matching criteria with each user profile. If a profile fits the criteria, each accepted identity included in the profile is forwarded to any connected Outputs.
User Profiles can contain data — including identities — collected from multiple workspaces. Even if your matching criteria only concerns data from a single workspace, once a matching user profile is found, all accepted identities are forwarded to the Output, even if the identities were collected in a different workspace.
You have created 2 workspaces in your account to track activity for two related apps, App A and App B. User John Smith signs up for both apps, using the email address john.smith@example.com
. However, he uses his iPad for App A and his iPhone for App B. This means that there are two different IDFA identities associated with John Smith’s profile. (note: read our IDSync documentation to understand more about how profiles with multiple identities are managed).
You create an audience in the App A workspace, and your criteria match John Smith’s user profile. When you connect that audience to an Output that accepts IDFAs, mParticle will forward both of John Smith’s IDFAs.
Audience A/B Testing allows you to split an audience into two or more variations and create connections for each variation independently, to help you to compare the performance of different messaging platforms. For example, if you have an audience of low engagement users that you want to reengage with your app, you might devise a test like this:
You can then compare the engagement outcomes for each group and apply the most successful strategy to the entire audience.
100 - [sum of all created variations]
. If you try to assign a percentage to a variation that would cause the total to exceed 100, you will see an error message.
Once you have defined your variations, you can connect each variation, including the ‘Control’ variation, to any output. There is also an option to connect your full audience to any output. From the Connect tab, select the variation you want to connect and follow the standard connection flow.
In the Audiences summary screen, audiences with an active A/B test will be marked with a % symbol.
Note that whenever the Audience Name is used in forwarding the audience to downstream partners, variant audiences will be named using the format [Audience External Name] - [Variant Name]
.
You can edit an audience definition without affecting the audience split, even after connecting to an output. When the audience is updated, the variants will still be balanced as defined when you created the test.
When you are ready to end a test, navigate to the A/B Test tab and click Delete Test
Deleting a test will delete all variations and any connections you have set up for each variation.
You can download a calculated audience as a CSV file. This is useful if you want to troubleshoot your audience criteria, or if you want to share your audience data with a partner without an official mParticle Audience integration.
Audience downloads take some time to prepare depending on the volume of users in the audience, ranging from a few minutes up to ~6 hours for extremely large audiences.
Audience downloads are available on Real-time audiences only. To download a Standard Audience, connect and send it to an infrastructure output, like Amazon S3 via a Kinesis connection, and download it from there.
You can initiate an Audience download, either from the main Audiences page:
or from the Audience Details tab of an individual audience page:
If the Audience includes A/B Testing Variants, you can select which variants you want to download.
You also need to select the identity types you want.
The download takes some time to prepare. When your download is ready, you will receive an email with download link.
The download will be a ZIP file which, when extracted, will contain a CSV file for each audience or variant, plus a manifest.json
file, with metadata about the csv files.
Audience CSV files have a row for each identity in the audience. Remember that a single user profile can have multiple identities and, therefore, multiple rows.
The four columns show a unix timestamp for when the audience membership was retrieved, the mParticle ID of the profile, the identity type, and the value:
mpid, scanned_timestamp_ms, identity_value, identity_type
-1327484737295091692, 1538596779, h.jekyll.md, customer_id
5991422180106081928, 1538596729, m.hyde@example.com, email
3269816782460039080, 1580148438137, 74587f4b-3ed5-492f-a0f5-9a6c4578673d, ios_idfv
The Manifest file will be in JSON format. See the following example for included fields:
{
"archive_name": "mParticleAudiences_204223Jan022019_9dd9.zip",
"id": "9dd9b6dc-f0ec-4acf-8b18-f3a357afe1c3",
"audience_ids": [
8754
],
"included_identities": [
"customer_id",
"email"
],
"manifest_generated": "2019-01-02T21:06:20.0216776Z",
"min_timestamp_ms": 1546463100276,
"max_timestamp_ms": 1546463100276,
"total_rows": 18,
"rows_by_identity": {
"customer_id": 15,
"email": 3
},
"files": [
{
"file_name": "8754_PotentialParisians_172136Nov292018.csv",
"min_timestamp_ms": 1546463100276,
"max_timestamp_ms": 1546463100276,
"total_users": 15,
"total_rows": 18,
"rows_by_identity": {
"customer_id": 15,
"email": 3
}
}
]
}
An audience can be deleted in the UI in a few ways, described as follows.
In the Audience Overview:
In the Audience itself:
An audience can also be deleted with the Platform API using the /audiences
endpoint.
Integrations behave differently downstream after an audience is deleted:
Audience | Downstream Behavior |
---|---|
Amazon Kinesis Firehose | Deleting an audience sends a message downstream. You must handle the delete message. |
Braze | Deleting an audience does not remove the custom attributes in Braze. |
mParticle deletes the downstream audience. | |
Google Ads | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
Google BigQuery | mParticle doesn’t delete downstream audience. |
Google Cloud Storage | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
LiveRamp | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. | |
Snapchat | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
theTradeDesk | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
TikTok | mParticle deletes the downstream audience. |
mParticle deletes the downstream audience. | |
Yahoo | mParticle doesn’t delete the downstream audience. |
If you have defined a large number of audience that you want to send to an Output, you can establish the connections for many audiences at once, rather than doing them one at a time.
You will see a status message showing all successful audience connections. If any audiences cannot be connected, error details will be shown.
As you continue to add audiences, you can use tags to help keep them organized. A tag is simply a label you can use to sort and search for audiences. For example, if you give all of your retargeting audiences a tag named ‘Retargeting’, you can easily find them all by filtering for the tag. You can add/remove tags for an audience directly from the Audience Manager, or in the Audience Settings. If you select more than one tag, the Audience Manager will show only audiences with both tags.
There is no limit to the number of tags you can create, but each tag name is limited to 18 characters or less.
If you clone an audience, it’s tags will be cloned, also.
If mParticle encounters errors forwarding an audience to an output, it will mark the connection as faulted. Audience Faults are visible from the Audience Manager, the Audience Connection screen, and the Audience tab on the Setup > Outputs page.
While an Audience is faulted, mParticle will stop trying to forward audiences until the fault is resolved.
Click the fault icon to view a detailed error message.
If you can’t determine the cause of the fault, the most common causes of faults include:
Authentication
When you believe you have resolved the issue, open the fault notification and click Resume to resume sending data.
mParticle’s new Standard Audiences feature lets you define and build audiences based on long-term historical data. Standard Audiences differ from Real-time Audiences, in a few key ways:
Standard audiences are purchased by buying annual calculation credits. Each calculation credit lets you run a calculation across 365 days of your historical data, regardless of how many audiences are included. You can calculate many standard audiences at once. There are prompts in the product to select the audiences to calculate and confirm how many credits you are spending.
Some example calculations and costs:
Standard audiences have a 4 stage lifecycle:
Standard Audiences are managed separately from Real-time audiences. Choose Audiences > Standard from the main navigation menu, and click New Standard Audience.
Just as with real-time audiences, you can define which inputs you want use to calculate the audience. For Standard Audiences you also need to define a date range. You can choose All available data or define any period within the available range. When you’re ready, click Create. The start and end dates are inclusive and it uses the UTC timezone.
Define your audience by clicking the plus sign to create and define one or more criteria. This step is the same as in real-time audiences. When your definition is ready, click Save as Draft. Notice that after a moment, a Calculate button displays next to the grayed-out Save as Draft button.
At the top of the Standard Audiences page from step 3, click Calculate.
Select any additional DRAFT audiences from the list to add them to the calculation. This modal will show you how many calculation credits will be deducted from your account. When you’re ready click Start Calculation.
At first your audience will show as Calculating in the list view Status column under Audience Details. While you wait for the calculation to complete, you can set up one or more audience connections by clicking the green plus sign in the Conencted Outputs column.
Calculation can take many hours for large amounts of data. You can track progress via a popup in the Size column.
The Connections screen functions the same as for real-time audiences. Add and configure one or more connections. The only difference is that when you save the connection, no data is forwarded until you explicitly send the audience.
Once your audience is completely calculated, you can see it in the Ready tab. Click Send next to an Audience to go back to the Connections screen.
From the Connections screen click Send. You can also adjust your output connections here as needed.
Select one or more audience Outputs and click Send.
This will forward all members of the audience to the Output.
Calculated audience will remain in the Ready tab for 30 days, after which they will need to be recalculated and can be found in the Archive tab. Once an audience is in the archive tab, you can clone and recalculate it. Remember that the audience will not be updated in real time. If you want to update the audience, you must run the calculation again.
mParticle’s Audience User Attribute Sharing feature allows you to include user attributes along with identities when you connect a supported audience connection. This allows you to use richer data in your activation platform, such as LTV, lead score or propensity to convert. This feature does not forward or share your user data to any company beyond what you are explicitly configuring as an audience connection.
Create the Audience Connection in the usual way. For affected partners, you will see the following notification:
If you want to forward User Attributes to this partner, make sure you set the Status to Inactive as you create the connection. This will make sure you do not begin forwarding data until you have selected the user attributes to forward.
From the connection screen, select the User Attributes you want to include. By default, all attributes are disabled. It may take up to 15 minutes before attributes begin to be forwarded.
Once you have selected the User Attributes you want to forward, Save and Activate the Audience, open the Settings and set the Status to Active
to begin forwarding identities.
mParticle’s user profile stores user attributes across platforms, workspaces and accounts. This means that, if your audience output uses device IDs, and if you are tracking a user across multiple platforms (mobile and web, for example) you may be able to forward user attributes that were not collected on the targeted mobile devices.
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