Creating Audiences

Build targeted audience segments based on user behavior and traits.

What are Audiences?

Audiences (also called segments) are groups of users who share common characteristics or behaviors. Audiences can be used to:

• Target specific user groups in advertising campaigns
• Personalize user experiences
• Analyze cohort behavior
• Trigger automated workflows

Pre-requisites for creating the Audience

• Segmentation logic & criteria

• Static or Dynamic audiences

• Time-frame for segment creation

• How frequent the audience needs to be refreshed to the destinations

  Tip

  Learn more about

  • Segmentation Criteria here.
  • Static or Dynamic audiences here.
  • Refresh Interval here.

Audience Dashboard

You can have an overall view of all your saved audiences in the Audience Dashboard on the “Audience” page. The audience dashboard displays the list of active, draft, & archived audiences along with their active destinations and other action buttons.

In this dashboard, you have 3 tabs – Active, Draft & Archived.

Active

1. You can see all the Active audiences under the Active tab. In case you want to deactivate any audience, you can turn off the toggle under the Status column and the audience will be deactivated and moved to the Archived tab.

   Note

   Once the audience is deactivated, it will not be refreshed and will stop syncing with the destinations.

2. In the Active Destinations column, you can see the status of the audience sync with the destinations you have connected.

3. You can see the green indicator next to the destination to which you’ve synced the audience. If the audience is not synced, it would show in grey.

4. Under “Audience Size,” you can see the size of the particular audience i.e. number of users in the audience segment. This audience size is updated when it is last refreshed.

5. “Refresh Interval”, “Created date”, “Last refreshed date” is also visible.

6. Under “Actions” you can able to view, edit and delete the audience.

   

Draft

1. In the Draft tab, you can see all the audiences that you saved as drafts. Drafts are just to save the queries and activate them later.
2. You can re-activate the audience at any time by clicking on the audience/edit icon → Update the query as you want → Click Run Query → Click Save & Active.
3. You can also update the draft by clicking on the audience/edit icon → Update the query as you want → Click Run Query → Click Update draft.

Archived

1. Under “Archived”, you can see all the inactive audiences.
2. You can re-activate the Archived audience by clicking on the audience/edit icon → Update the query as required → Click Run Query → Click Save & Active.

Creating an Audience Segment

Once the events have started populating, you can create a segment of users based on their activity on your website or app. Before creating the audience, decide the time-frame and logic for which you want to create the audience.

After creating an audience segment, it starts accumulating the users who match the given criteria which can be synced with the ad platforms like Facebook, Google, TikTok, etc.

To create an audience segmentation, navigate to the “Audience” in the left sidebar and click on “Audience”.

You have two options to create an audience:

• Create a new custom audience
• Use Suggested audiences
  

Create a new custom audience

1. Now, create a custom audience segment by clicking on “Create a custom audience”.

   

2. Here, you can filter a segment of users by adding conditions manually.

   

3. Apply the conditions based on your requirements. Add any attributes if needed by clicking on the “Add Attribute” button.

   Caution

   If any attributes are chosen, always ensure to click the green + button to add them to the query. If the green + button is not clicked after choosing the attribute, the condition will not be added to the query even though it is visisble.

   

4. Click Run Query to view the audience count.

   

   Tip

   The count displayed here is count of Unique Users who fits the filter criteria that was provided

   
   

5. Click “Save & Active”

6. Enter the Audience Name and Refresh interval. Check “Agree & Continue” box and click on “Save & Active”.

   Important

   • The name of the audience should be only in lower case with underscore _. Spaces and special characters are not allowed.
   • Setting the refresh interval to 1 will sync the total number of audience daily. It is recommended to set the refresh interval to 1 for the first 3 days. After that you can set it to desired frequency.
   

Use Suggested audiences

We have pre-configured a few audiences that are frequently used by marketers, which helps you easily segment the audience without adding any conditions.

For example, if you want to create an audience who has viewed a product but not purchased it in the last 90 days,

1. You simply click on the suggested audience

2. This automatically applies the filters for the audience

   

3. Then click on “Run Query” to view the audience count

4. Finally, click on “Save & Active” to save the audience

   

Ways to filter the data

Segmenting Users and groups

CustomerLabs allows you to create segments for both individual users or groups of users.

• Go to Audiences → Create a custom audience
• On the top right, you can see an option “Segment by” with a drop down
• The default value is “Users”
• You can change it to group

This will allow you to choose between filtering the data based on individual users using user_traits and events or groups of users based on group_traits and the users’ belonging to the group and their activities.

Segmentation Criteria

Audiences can be created in CustomerLabs using the following pre-built criteria. Any information tracked in the website or app can fit into one of these categories.

Options available for “Segment by Users” are:

• Demographics: City, State, Country, Language, etc.

• Technology: Browser, Device type, Platform.

• UTM Paramters: Any UTM paramters that are used in your campaigns (such as source, medium, campaign, etc.)

• Other Parameters: Any other properties, traits or external ids that are captured in the website (such as click id, cart token, user id, etc)

• User Traits: All user traits that are captured and stored can be used (such as email, phone, city, address, etc)

• Events: Any interactions with website and app (such as pages visited, add to cart, checkout, purchase, form submission, etc.)

  

Options available for “Segment by Groups” are:

• By Account: All account traits such as company name, company website, number of employees, etc.
• Events: Any interactions with website and app (such as pages visited, add to cart, checkout, purchase, form submission, etc.)
  • Occurance: While choosing the event, you can filter the data based on the occurrence of the event like Occured, First occurred, Last occurred, Not occurred.
  • Event Count: While choosing the event, you can filter the data based based on the count of the event like Count is equal to, Count is not equal to, Count is greater than, Count is less than, Count is greater than or equal to, Count is less than or equal to.
  • Date range: Refer Deciding the time-frame for segment creation.

Tip

Learn more about Event Properties, User traits, External ids in our Properties.

Setting up the event filtering

1. Occurance: While choosing the event, you can filter the data based on the occurrence of the event like Occured, First occurred, Last occurred, Not occurred.
2. Event Count: While choosing the event, you can filter the data based based on the count of the event like Count is equal to, Count is not equal to, Count is greater than, Count is less than, Count is greater than or equal to, Count is less than or equal to.
3. Date range: Refer Deciding the time-frame for segment creation.
4. Attributes: You can further filter the data using attributes (if available) for the event. For example:

• url can be added as attribute for pageview event.

• product_name or product_id or variant_id, etc can be added as attributes for e-commerce events like product viewed or added to cart event for filtering the users who have viewed a specific product or added to cart.

  Tip

  Multiple filters and attributes can be added to the same event for more granular filtering.

  Always click the + icon to add the filters and attributes. If + icon is not clicked after choosing the attributes, it will not be applied even though it is chosen.

  
  

5. Multiple actions can be combined for advanced segmentation by clicking on the “Add another action” button and using the conditional filter “AND” or “OR”.

   • And: Filters the data that match the criteria of all the actions.
   • Or: Filters the data that match the criteria of any one of the actions.
   

   Tip

   For example, here’s how you can use “AND” function to combine actions. If you want to choose users who have added to cart but did not purchase,

   • Added to cart occurred greater than or equal to 1 time
   • Click Add another Action and choose “AND” as the conditional filter
   • Purchased (or cl_purchase if you have setup server-side purchase) not occurred greater than or equal to 1 time

Deciding the time-frame for segment creation

Audiences can be created in CustomerLabs with static and dynamic dates.

Static Date Range

• The audience is created for a fixed date range.
• No new users are added or removed from the segment as this is for a fixed date range.
• Refresh interval is not applicable for static audiences (even if specified).

Dynamic Date Range

• The audience is created for a dynamic date range that keeps changing.
• New users are added or removed from the segment based on the given date range and refresh interval.
• Options available for dynamic date range are:

  • in the last ‘x’ days: Filters the data in the last specified number of days.

  • date from: Filters the data from the date mentioned till date and keeps on extending every day.

  • yesterday: Filters data for the previous day.

  • days between: Filter collects from and to days relative to the current day, enabling to select a rolling audience for a specific period.

  • in the last 2 hours, 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours, and 24 hours: Filters the data in the last specified number of hours.

    Tip

    Examples:

    • If you want to keep adding audiences who have done a specified action from Jan 1, 2024 and keep adding users, you will have to choose dynamic date from.
    • If you want to create an audience who have done specified action between 7 days ago and 30 days ago, you will have to choose days between where from is set to 7 and to date is set to 30.

Refresh Interval

The first-party audiences created in CustomerLabs can be synced with platforms connected as destinations (e.g. Facebook, Google Ads, GA4, etc.). The refresh interval is the time interval after which the audience is refreshed to connected platforms.

Important

While refreshing audience, the total count of the audience is consumed as events for each refresh. For example, if the audience count is 1000 and the refresh interval is 3 days, then 1000 events will be consumed for every 3 days during refresh. So, choose the refresh interval wisely based on your event consumption.

For large audience size, it is recommended to set the refresh interval to 1 for the first 3 days. After that you can switch it to longer frequency, but not more than 28 days.

If audience size is more than 100k, kindly reach out to our support team via e-mail to set up the audience sync. We will help you identify the best possible refresh interval considering your event consumption and audience size.

Why should you refresh the audience?

• When audiences are created with dynamic date range, the audience will dynamically change based on the time frame. Since the audience keeps on changing, the latest audience must be syned with the connected platforms.
• This refresh interval updates the audiences at fixed intervals to ensure that the audience is up-to-date with the latest users who match the given criteria.

What is the ideal refresh interval?

• The ideal refresh interval depends on the type of audience you are creating.
• For audiences that are created with dynamic date range, it is recommended to set the refresh interval to 1 for the first 3 days. After that you can switch it to desired frequency.
• However, since events will be consumed for everytime the audience is synced, it is recommended to set the refresh interval to balance both the audience accuracy and event consumption.
• For audiences that are created with static date range, the refresh interval can be set to any value as it will only be synced once.

Based on the date range chosen, the audience becomes a static or dynamic audience.

1. Static audience is fixed for the date range given and no new users are added or removed from the segment.

2. Dynamic audience is changing and new users are added or removed based on the given date range and refresh interval. Every time an audience gets refreshed, an inclusion event called added_to_segment is assigned to the user who enters the audience segment and an exclusion event called removed_from_segment is assigned to the user who is excluded from the audience segment based on the audience filter criteria.

   Note

   Based on the refresh interval, the audiences are refreshed with the ad platforms which helps in improving the match rates of the audiences. It is highly recommended to create a dynamic audience for this refresh to happen.

Modifying the refresh interval

1. Click on the view icon (eye icon) in the audiences page.
   
2. Go to “Configuration” tab.
3. Change the refresh interval and enter the desired interval.
4. Click on the “Save Configuration” button.
   

Next Steps

• Sync audience with Meta Ads
• Sync audience with Google Ads
• Sync audience with Klaviyo