Composable Audiences is mParticle’s zero-copy solution for segmentation. With Composable Audiences, you can create dynamic user segments using data stored directly in your cloud data warehouse. This approach lets you take advantage of rich, custom attributes and events that already live in your own systems, without needing to copy data into mParticle.
\nEach time a composable audience runs, mParticle evaluates the data currently available through its configured warehouse models. Audience freshness depends on both the freshness of the source data in the warehouse and the audience’s configured refresh cadence.
\nComposable Audiences are the right choice when you care about a customer’s accumulated history, attributes, or modeled data—things that live in your warehouse. These audiences are ideal for planned, lifecycle-driven campaigns where hours or days of latency are acceptable. For example:
\nBecause these audiences run on a scheduled basis against your warehouse, they are well-suited for strategic campaigns like loyalty promotions, cross-sell recommendations, or reactivation offers.
\nReal-time audiences are best for reactive, intent-driven triggers where seconds or minutes matter. These audiences use streaming data ingested directly into mParticle and update in real time. For example:
\nIf the value of your engagement depends on acting while intent is fresh, real-time audiences are the right fit. See the Audiences Overview to get started with Real-Time Audiences.
\nBefore you can start building audiences, there are two parts to the setup process:
\nWarehouse setup: This step is typically done by a data engineer or database administrator. It includes:
\nAudience setup: Once the connection and models are in place, a marketer or analyst can:
\nTogether, these steps give you a zero-copy way to create audiences: your data stays in your warehouse, while mParticle queries it securely on your schedule to keep audience membership up to date.
\nTo get started, go to the User Guide.
\nHybrid Audiences allows you to include composable audience membership as a criteria when building a real-time audience. This is helpful when you have long-term customer data stored in your cloud warehouse, like account information, LTV, or churn risk, that you want to reference from a real-time audience built on in-the-moment behavioral data such as product views and cart activity. Hybrid Audiences also extends Composable Audiences in two ways: it records audience membership on mParticle user profiles, and it optionally enriches the data sent to your downstream connections with additional profile information.
\nAudience membership recording happens automatically when you enable a composable audience for hybrid use. Each time the audience runs, mParticle matches warehouse users to their mParticle profiles using the identities you configured (such as email or customer ID). Once a match is found, mParticle marks that profile as a member of the audience. This makes composable audience membership visible in Customer 360, the User Activity View, and the Profile API, and allows you to reference it as criteria when building real-time audiences.
\nProfile enrichment is optional and configured per output connection. When enabled, mParticle supplements the data sent to each downstream integration with additional information from the matched mParticle profile — such as additional identities, user attributes, and device info — even if that data was not present in your warehouse. See Enrich with in-platform profile data for details.
\nTogether, these capabilities let you combine rich warehouse data with in-the-moment activity from mParticle in a single audience, powering more precise personalization, triggering, and suppression across your downstream tools.
\nHybrid Audiences combines composable and real-time audiences so you can use long-term customer context stored in your warehouse with in-the-moment user behavior captured in mParticle in the same audience. Hybrid Audiences are most helpful when you want to:
\nmParticle processes each user record from your warehouse in two stages.
\nStage 1: Identity matching and audience membership
\nWhen a composable audience is enabled for hybrid use, mParticle looks up a matching profile for each user with the identities you selected when configuring your data model (for example, email address or customer ID). If a matching profile is found, mParticle records the user as a member of the audience on that profile. If a user is linked to more than one mParticle profile — for example, because the same email appears on multiple profiles — all linked profiles are updated.
\nThis membership record is what makes the audience visible in Customer 360, the User Activity View, and the Profile API, and what allows real-time audiences to use composable audience membership as a criterion.
\nUsers in your warehouse who cannot be matched to an mParticle profile are not recorded as audience members and will not appear in real-time audience criteria. mParticle keeps track of the users that are not matched so that if those user profiles do appear in mParticle at a later time, the composable audience membership will be added to them.
\n\nStage 2: Profile enrichment on egress (optional)
\nWhen you connect a composable audience to a downstream output and enable Include CDP Profile Attributes, mParticle enriches the data sent to that output with additional information from the matched mParticle profile. This can include identities, user attributes, and device information that were not present in your warehouse.
\nEnrichment is configured independently for each output, so you can choose to enrich data for some connections while sending only warehouse data to others. Keep in mind that some of the audience integrations only support sending certain data points, meaning even if a composable audience is enriched with additional data from mParticle user profiles, the additional data might not be sent downstream if the downstream vendor does not support receiving that type of data.
\n\nFor example, imagine that you want to reach customers who are both valuable over the long term (high LTV) and currently showing strong purchase intent. You could accomplish this with a hybrid audience built from:
\nFirst, you must create a composable audience that can retrieve the user data needed from your warehouse.
\nSecond, you create the real-time audience that will include members of your composable audience. This real-time audience is the “hybrid” audience.
\nHybrid audiences are activated just like any other audience in mParticle. You connect them to your downstream destinations and use them for personalization, triggering, or suppression alongside your existing segments.
\nWhen a composable audience initializes, mParticle translates your audience definition (the criteria that determine which users should be included in the audience) into a SQL query. This query is then executed directly within your data warehouse using your warehouse’s compute resources.
\nThe SQL query returns a list of users and (optional) attributes that make up the audience at that particular point in time. This data is stored in a temporary table in your data warehouse that is provisioned for internal processing only. These datasets are not part of your production tables and are only used by mParticle to track audience membership over time. These additional datasets are automatically managed and cleaned up by mParticle.
\nmParticle pulls the users and any optional attribute data from your warehouse before forwarding them to your connected downstream integration.
\nWhen you create a composable audience, you specify the cadence at which it refreshes. Note that composable audiences can’t be refreshed in real-time.
\nA recently refreshed audience may still reflect stale source data if the underlying warehouse tables haven’t been updated. Newly updated warehouse data won’t affect membership until the audience runs again.
\nmParticle operates independently of its identity resolution framework when using Composable Audiences. No profile matching, enrichment, or merging takes place. Audience membership is based solely on the logic in your SQL query provided in the data model and the structure of your source data. This makes the feature highly transparent and deterministic, giving you full control over how your audiences are built and updated. It also means that records in your data warehouse must include some form of user identifier (like a user ID or customer ID) that can be used when determining audience membership.
\nWhen a composable audience is enabled for hybrid use, additional processing occurs: mParticle matches warehouse users to mParticle profiles and optionally enriches outbound data with profile information. See How does hybrid processing work? for details.
\nmParticle only stores the data needed to create and activate composable and hybrid audiences, including:
\nNo other warehouse data is stored in mParticle beyond these items.
\nBy default, composable audiences do not modify user profiles in mParticle. Audience membership is calculated in your warehouse and forwarded to outputs without changing identities, profiles, attributes, or events in mParticle.
\nWhen a composable audience is marked as Enable for Hybrid Audiences, mParticle performs identity matching each time the audience runs. For each composable audience user where a matching mParticle profile is found, mParticle writes the audience membership state to that profile. This makes it possible to:
\nHybrid audiences do not write warehouse attributes, events, or identity changes back into user profiles in mParticle. Only audience membership state is recorded on the profile as a result of hybrid processing.
\nTo improve performance, mParticle only sends changes in audience membership (specifically, the users who have been added to or removed from the audience) rather than the full list each time. The first time the audience is executed, the entire set of qualifying users is returned. For subsequent runs, mParticle compares the new audience snapshot with the previous one to determine which users have been added or dropped.
\nThis “diff-ing” logic happens entirely within the data warehouse environment. Two snapshots of the audience (previous and current) are compared using SQL, and only the incremental changes are passed back into mParticle for forwarding to downstream integrations. This approach ensures both scalability and efficiency in audience refresh cycles.
\n\nYes. Hybrid, composable, and real-time audiences can work together.
\nYou create a user data model in your warehouse setup, making sure to map the identifiers from your warehouse to your in-platform identifiers and enabling them for use when matching users in your warehouse to in-platform profiles on the Identity Settings page of your user data model settings.\nYou build a composable audience on top of that model and choose to make it enabled for hybrid use cases so that membership is written back to user profiles. You create a real-time audience that uses audience membership criteria to reference that composable audience.
\nThis pattern lets you combine warehouse-modeled logic with in-session behavior without copying warehouse data into mParticle or rebuilding the same logic twice. Composable audiences still run on a scheduled cadence in your warehouse, and real-time audiences continue to update in real time.
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