Combining Inclusive and Exclusive Audiences

Following is a realistic scenario in which logic blocks are used to create a complex audience group that contains both inclusive and exclusive audiences. Combining inclusive and exclusive audiences using logic blocks is useful when you want inclusive behavior at one level and exclusive behavior inside nested logic blocks. This is most helpful when:

• You want users to belong to multiple high level cohorts, such as genres or product lines, while still assigning them to a single sub audience inside each cohort.
• You are running several overlapping campaigns inside a cohort and want that flexibility, while keeping certain dimensions, like subscription tier, mutually exclusive.

Use this approach when you want to treat some cohorts as inclusive for targeting and personalization, while still enforcing exclusivity for certain audiences that should never overlap, such as subscription level.

Before continuing, make sure you understand what logic blocks are and how they create exclusivity between audiences as described in the Overview.

Example: Genre-Based Audiences with Subscription Tiers

As an example, imagine you run the marketing campaigns for a streaming service and want to build audiences based on the genres viewers watch and their subscription tier.

Viewers should be added to multiple genre-specific audiences (like Comedy and Drama) based on their viewing behavior. However, within each genre, a viewer should only be added to a single subscription tier audience: either Basic Subscribers or Premium Subscribers.

Business Scenario

The streaming service wants to:

• Send genre-specific content recommendations to viewers based on their viewing habits
• Target different subscription tiers with appropriate offers (upgrade offers for Basic, exclusive content for Premium)
• Ensure viewers receive multiple genre recommendations if they watch multiple genres
• Prevent viewers from being in both Basic and Premium audiences for the same genre

Expected Behavior

After completing this example:

• A viewer who watches Comedy and Drama will be in both Comedy Viewers and Drama Viewers (inclusive)
• Within Comedy Viewers, the viewer will be in either Comedy: Basic Subscribers OR Comedy: Premium Subscribers (exclusive)
• A Premium subscriber who watches multiple genres will appear in multiple Premium audiences (Comedy: Premium, Drama: Premium, etc.)

Step 1: Create the audience group

First, create your audience group:

1. In the left navigation, navigate to Segmentation > Audiences.
2. Click New Audience, enter a descriptive name for the audience group, like “Movie Viewers”, and select the data inputs needed to provide the user and event data that the audiences will be built from.
3. Click Create.

Step 2: Create the genre audiences

1. After creating the audience group, you are automatically taken to the Audience Builder. Here, you can create your first genre-based audience.
2. Note that the audience name is automatically populated with the name of your audience group. Replace this with the name of your first genre-based audience, like “Comedy Viewers”.
3. Add the necessary event or user-based membership criteria to collect all users who have viewed a comedy movie. For example: Users who watched a comedy movie in the last 30 days.

4. Using the Add path button, create the three remaining genre-based audiences: Drama Viewers, Horror Viewers, and Romantic Comedy Viewers. Each of these audiences should be a direct child of the audience group inputs.

As soon as you add the second genre-based audience (Drama Viewers), a logic block will be drawn around your two audiences. As you continue to add your genre audiences, they are automatically added to this same logic block. This allows for inclusivity between audiences: a viewer who watches both comedy and drama will be added to both Comedy Viewers and Drama Viewers.

Step 3: Add subscription tier audiences for each genre

Next, you will create two subscription tier audiences under each genre: one for Basic Subscribers and one for Premium Subscribers.

1. Click the + button beneath the Comedy Viewers audience and click Audience.

2. Select Start from Scratch and click Next.
3. Enter a name, like “Comedy: Basic Subscribers”, and enter your membership criteria. For example: Users where subscription-tier is basic.
4. Using the Add path button beneath the Comedy Viewers audience, create another audience for your premium subscribers. Note that both subscription tier audiences are contained in a new logic block called Block 1. To prevent overlap between these two audiences, we need to create a new logic block.

5. Click the action menu icon on Comedy: Basic Subscribers, and select Move.

6. This opens the Move Audience window where we can create a new logic block. Select Create New Logic Block and accept the suggested name: “Comedy: Basic Subscribers”.

7. Click Create and Move to create a new logic block named “Comedy: Basic Subscribers” and move your audience into this block. Now, you will see two logic blocks, one titled Block 1 and the new logic block titled “Comedy: Basic Subscribers”. We can rename Block 1 to something more descriptive by clicking the three-dot action menu icon next to the block title and clicking Edit Logic & Priority.

8. In the Update Logic Blocks window, enter a more descriptive name for Block 1, like “Comedy: Premium Subscribers”. This window also allows you to modify the priority for your logic blocks. Since we only need two logic blocks to separate our viewers into subscription tiers, the block priority won’t impact our audiences. In more complex cases the block priority determines which block’s audiences a user is added to when they qualify for more than one, with higher priority blocks being assessed first.

9. Now, the Comedy Viewers audience has two child audiences: Comedy: Premium Subscribers and Comedy: Basic Subscribers. These two audiences are exclusive: members of Comedy Viewers will be separated into each audience according to their subscription, with no overlap between the two.

Repeat this process to create Premium and Basic Subscriber audiences for each of the remaining genres: Drama, Horror, and Romantic Comedy.

For each genre:

1. Create two subscription tier audiences (Basic and Premium) as children of the genre audience
2. Move one of them into a new logic block
3. Rename the logic blocks appropriately

Your final structure should look like this:

Understanding Exclusivity Between Logic Blocks

It’s important to remember that logic blocks are only exclusive relative to other sibling logic blocks under the same parent audience. In other words, Comedy: Premium Subscribers and Comedy: Basic Subscribers will never share users.

However, if a user has a basic subscription and watches both comedy and drama, they will appear in both the Comedy: Basic Subscribers and Drama: Basic Subscribers audiences.

Step 4: Validate your audience configuration

You can use Audience Preview to validate your audience configuration:

• Users who watch multiple genres should appear in the audience for each genre they watch, such as Comedy Viewers and Drama Viewers.
• Within a single genre, a viewer should only be added to either the Basic or Premium subscription audience, never both at the same time.
• A premium subscriber who watches multiple genres should appear in multiple Premium subscriber genre audiences, such as Comedy: Premium Subscribers and Drama: Premium Subscribers.

Additional Patterns

The genre + subscription tier pattern demonstrated in this example can be applied to many other scenarios:

Product Lines + Customer Segments

Create inclusive audiences for different product lines (Electronics, Home Goods, Apparel) with exclusive customer segments within each line (New Customers, VIP Customers, At-Risk Customers).

Use case: Send product-specific promotions while ensuring customers only receive messaging appropriate to their current lifecycle stage for each product line.

Geographic Regions + Offer Types

Create inclusive audiences for different geographic regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest) with exclusive offer types within each region (Standard Offer, Premium Offer, Limited-Time Offer).

Use case: Run region-specific campaigns while controlling which offer each user receives based on priority rules within their region.

Campaign Types + User Lifecycle Stages

Create inclusive audiences for different campaign types (Email Campaign, Push Campaign, In-App Campaign) with exclusive lifecycle stages within each type (Active, Dormant, Churned).

Use case: Run multiple campaign types simultaneously while ensuring users only receive messaging appropriate to their current lifecycle stage for each campaign type.

Troubleshooting

Users Appearing in Multiple Exclusive Audiences

If a user appears in multiple audiences that should be exclusive:

• Verify the audiences are in separate logic blocks under the same parent
• Check the block priority order—the user may qualify for multiple blocks and is being added to the highest priority one
• Confirm the parent audience is the same for both logic blocks

Users Not Appearing in Expected Audiences

If a user is missing from an expected audience:

• Verify the user meets all criteria for the audience
• Check if a higher-priority sibling logic block is capturing the user first
• Review the audience’s environment settings (Production vs. Development)
• Confirm the audience has been activated or calculated

Logic Block Not Appearing

If logic blocks are not visible in the Audience Group Editor:

• Ensure you have created at least two sibling audiences using the Add path button
• Confirm you are viewing the Audience Group Editor, not an individual Audience Builder
• Check that you are viewing an audience group, not a single audience from the Audiences landing page