Audience Library or Real-Time Audiences
13 Aug 2017 » MSA
The Profiles & Audiences core service has two main components: Customer Attributes (the “profiles” part) and the Audience Library (the “audiences” part). Today I am going to focus on the latter, which is also called Real-Time Audiences. As its name implies, it allows you to create audiences, for which visitors qualify in real time.
What is the Audience Library?
If you are reading this post, you are familiar with the concept of audiences or segments. Today’s marketing relies on creating groups of people with common interests and send them appropriate messages. Besides, it has become more and more important to know as soon as possible when someone should belong to a segment. Hence, a real-time audience is an group of visitors, who have exhibited some common behavioural traits, and it is needed to know when a particular visitor is part of this audience immediately.
However, this feature has certain limitations, which you need to be aware of:
- It usually requires an Adobe Analytics implementation. The reason is that the audiences will use Analytics dimensions and metrics only. As I explained in the previous paragraph, behavioural data is the base of real-time audiences. The only case when you will not need it is when there are existing segments that you want to combine.
- Only Adobe Experience Cloud solutions can use it. Currently, only Adobe Target and Adobe Campaign (Standard and v6) are supported.
Do I really need it?
The first question you need to ask yourself is whether you need this feature. It only makes sense to use it under some use cases. Here you have some quick tips to help you decide:
- Do you already have an AAM license? If the answer is “yes”, stop reading this post. The Audience Library is a subset of AAM. You can do everything you need in AAM and much, much more.
- Do you use Adobe Target and its segmentation capabilities enough for you? If so, obviously, you do not need any other tool to create audiences.
- Are Adobe Analytics shared segments enough for your use cases? Analytics segments are more powerful than real-time audiences, except for their 24h delay.
If you replied “no” to all questions, then creating audiences via the Audience Library might be for you. Otherwise, I would not recommend you use this tool to create audiences.
Creating Real-Time Audiences
The first step is to get the Audience Library provisioned.
When you receive confirmation of the provisioning, log in to the Adobe Experience Cloud interface and go to Profiles and Audiences:
In order to create a new one, click on the “+ New” button and follow the wizard:
In this example, I am creating an audience for visitors who have logged in (eVar2 == “authenticated”) in the report suite “AEM 16 EMEA”. You will also see a graph with an estimate of the audience size. I recommend to use a naming convention, for example, prepending “RTA” in the name.
And this is it. You can start creating campaigns or activities based on these audiences. In Adobe Target you will see this new audience immediately available:
However, it will take a few hours until it starts collecting some data.
The case of Adobe Campaign is more complex and requires a separate post.