Audience

Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant experiences between consumers and brands they love. Braze helps brands foster human connection through interactive conversations across channels.

mParticle audiences correspond to Braze’s Segments feature and can be used to target engagement campaigns in Braze.

Prerequisites

In order to activate our Braze integration, you’re going to need the API key for each app that you’d like to set up, which can be found by logging into your Braze account and navigating to your app’s settings. You will also need to create an App Group REST API Key in the Developer Console.

Braze Instance

Braze maintains several instances. As part of the Configuration Settings, you need to specify which one your data should be forwarded to. You can tell your Braze Instance from the URL of your Braze Dashboard.

Instance	Dashboard URL
US 01 Cluster	https://dashboard-01.braze.com
US 02 Cluster	https://dashboard-02.braze.com
US 03 Cluster	https://dashboard-03.braze.com
US 04 Cluster	https://dashboard-04.braze.com
US 05 Cluster	https://dashboard-05.braze.com
US 06 Cluster	https://dashboard-06.braze.com
US 07 Cluster	https://dashboard-07.braze.com
US 08 Cluster	https://dashboard-08.braze.com
EU 01 Cluster	https://dashboard-01.braze.eu
EU 02 Cluster	https://dashboard-02.braze.eu
AU 01 Cluster	https://dashboard.au-01.braze.com

Check with your Braze account manager if you are unsure which Braze instance you are using.

There is also the ability to specify a Custom instance, which allows you to specify separate endpoints for REST, SDK and Javascript.

User Identity Mapping

mParticle will attempt to match users in Braze based on IDFAs, Android Device IDs, and a customizable External User ID field, which uniquely identifies a user in Braze. You can set which Identity Type to use as the External User ID in the Configuration Settings. Your External User ID should be a unique, permanent identifier — usually Customer ID or Email. If you are also using the Event integration, make sure you set the same External User ID across both integrations.

Forwarding Audiences

The Braze API does not allow mParticle to directly create and maintain membership of segments in Braze, so the Audience integration works by setting attributes on a user, which you can then use to define a corresponding segment in Braze. Like mParticle, Braze populates it’s Segment Manager based on the actual data points received, so you need to create audiences in mParticle and connect them to Braze first. Then, provided your audience is not empty, the segment membership attributes should become available in the Braze Segment Manager within a few minutes.

mParticle offers seven ways to set segment membership attributes, controlled by the Send Segments As Configuration Setting. The drop-down has the following options:

1. Single String Attribute (default)
2. Single Array Attribute
3. One Attribute Per Segment
4. Both Single Array Attribute and Single String Attribute
5. Both Single Array Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment
6. Both Single String Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment
7. Single Array Attribute, Single String Attribute, and One Attribute Per Segment

These options will be explained in further detail below.

Sample Audience Membership

You can find the ID for an audience under the audience’s name when viewing it within a journey. For example, the ID of the audience below is 13561.

Single String Attribute

This is the default behavior. mParticle creates a single custom attribute in Braze for each user, called SegmentMembership. The value of this attribute is a comma-separated string of mParticle audience IDs that match the user.

Using the above examples, a user who is a member of Test Audience 1, Test Audience 2, and Test Audience 3 will show the attribute SegmentMembership with a value of "'13053','13052', '13051'" in Braze. See the Sample Braze Profile for an example.

To target members of Test Audience 1, for example, you need to create a matching segment in Braze using the mParticle Audience ID, with the filter SegmentMembership — matches regex — 13051. It’s important to choose the matches regex option, and not equals, or users with membership in more than one audience will not be matched.

Single Array Attribute

mParticle creates a single custom array attribute in Braze for each user, called SegmentMembershipArray. The value of this attribute is an array of mParticle audience IDs that match the user.

Using the above examples, a user who is a member of Test Audience 1, Test Audience 2, and Test Audience 3 will show the attribute SegmentMembershipArray with a value of ["13053","13052", "13051"] in Braze. Note, however, that Braze parses array attributes to make them more readable.

See the Sample Braze Profile for an example.

To target members of Test Audience 1, for example, you need to create a matching segment in Braze with the filter SegmentMembershipArray — includes value — 13051

One Attribute Per Segment

mParticle creates a custom attribute in Braze for each audience that a user belongs to, based on the External Name of the audience.

Using the above examples, a user who is a member of audience Test Audience 1 will show the attribute In Test Audience 1 is true in Braze.

To target members of Test Audience 1, for example, you need to create a matching segment in Braze with the filter In Test Audience 1 — equals — true.

Both Single Array Attribute and Single String Attribute

mParticle will send attributes as described by both Single Array Attribute and Single String Attribute.

Both Single Array Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment

mParticle will send attributes as described by both Single Array Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment.

Both Single String Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment

mParticle will send attributes as described by both Single String Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment.

Single Array Attribute, Single String Attribute, and One Attribute Per Segment

mParticle will send attributes as described by Single Array Attribute, Single String Attribute and One Attribute Per Segment.

Sample Braze Profile

Here is a sample Braze profile with all options enabled.

Deactivating and Deleting Connections

Since mParticle does not directly maintain segments in Braze, it will not delete segments when the corresponding mParticle audience connection is deleted or deactivated. When this happens, mParticle will not update the audience user attributes in Braze to remove the audience from each user.

Deleting an Audience

Deleting an audience does not remove the custom attributes in Braze.

Configuration Settings

Setting Name	Data Type	Default Value	Description
API Key	string		Your app’s API Key can be found in your Braze dashboard.
API Key Operating System	enum	Unselected	Select which operating system your Braze API key corresponds to. This selection will limit the types of push tokens that will be forwarded on an audience update.
Send Segments As	enum	Single String Attribute	The method of sending audiences to Braze. Audience membership can be uploaded as a custom attribute containing comma-separated audience IDs, a custom array attribute containing audience IDs, and / or one attribute per audience with a boolean value to indicate membership. Warning: If multiple configurations use the same credentials and cluster, options involving single attributes may cause values to be overwritten on Braze’s end.
App Group REST API Key	string		The App Group REST API Key can be found in the developer console section of the Braze dashboard.
External Identity Type	enum	Customer ID	The mParticle User Identity type to forward as an External ID to Braze.
Email Identity Type	enum	Email	The mParticle User Identity Type to forward as the Email to Braze.
Braze Instance	enum	US 03 Cluster	Specify which cluster your Braze data will be forwarded to. Please ensure you are contractually authorized to use the EU cluster if you select that option. If you choose ‘Custom’, you will need to provide separate endpoints for your SDK, Server, and Web data.
Forward Push Tokens	bool	True	If enabled, mParticle will forward user Push Tokens to Braze.