Linked Audiences

With Linked Audiences, you can use the relational data you’ve defined in your Data Graph to build audiences and send them to your downstream actions-based destination.

From the relationships you’ve defined between the profiles and entities in your warehouse, you can filter on an entity, profile trait, and audience membership conditions to create hyper-segmented audiences.

Getting started

To help you get started with Linked Audiences, consider the following best practices:

• It may be helpful to first identify an entity that is directly associated with your users, such as Accounts, Households, or Organizations.
• From there you can define relationships between this entity with any of the other entities that may be associated with it, such as how Accounts can have the following: Subscriptions, Purchases, or Carts.
• You can create entity relationships up to four levels in depth. For example, an entity condition that queries for relationships between Profiles, Accounts, Credit Cards, and Transactions has four levels of depth.
• To further refine your audience, identify column values that you might want to filter your entities by, or configure profile traits and audience membership conditions.

Step 1: Build a Linked Audience

You can build a Linked Audience from profiles associated with an entity, trait, or existing audience.

1. Navigate to Engage > Audiences.
2. Click + New audience, then select Audience.
3. On the Select Type screen, select Linked audience, then click Next.
4. Select one of the following conditions to build your audience from:
   • associated with an entity: creates a condition that filters profiles associated with an entity.
   • where profile trait: creates a condition that filters profiles with a specific trait.
   • part of an audience: creates a condition that filters profiles that are part of an existing audience.
5. Preview your audience, then click Next.
6. Enter an audience name and description, then click Create Audience.

After creating the audience, you’ll be redirected to the Overview page. By default, the audience is disabled. You’ll need to manually enable the audience for the audience to compute.

Custom traits

You can build Linked Audiences based on custom traits. These traits can be collected from your apps when a user completes a form or signs up using an Identify call. You can view these traits in the Profile explorer, as well. Custom traits are mutable and update to the latest value seen by the user’s Identify events.

Entity conditions

You can build Linked Audiences based on relational data from the data warehouse. Creating an entity condition will allow you to traverse the nested entity relationships defined in the Data Graph, as well as filter on entity properties at each level.

Compute statuses

Engage displays the following compute statuses for Linked Audiences.

Computation status	Description
Computing	Engage is computing the Linked Audience.
Live	Users will enter the audience as it’s computed on the scheduled hourly cadence.
Disabled	The Linked Audience is disabled.
Failed	The computation was cancelled or failed to compute. Please contact Segment support.

Use cases

Below are some example use cases to help you learn more about Linked Audiences.

Use case 1: Build an audience of users who have a credit card with an outstanding balance

To build this audience, you’ll need to define a nested entity condition to relate a Profile to their:

• Account entity
• Credit Card entity where credit_card.balance is “Outstanding”

In the Data Graph, Account and Credit Card are defined as entities and represented as separate tables in your data warehouse. Relationships are defined between:

• Profile and Account
• Account and Credit Card

In the warehouse, credit_card.balance is a column in the Credit Card table. By filtering against the credit_card.balance column for the “Outstanding” value, marketers can return a list of users that have a credit card with an outstanding balance.

Use case 2: Build an audience of cat owners who are also a part of the platinum membership tier

To build this audience, you’ll need to define a nested entity condition to relate a Profile to their:

• Household entity
• Pet entity where pet.type is “Cat”

You’ll also need to define an audience membership condition to filter for users that are a member of the “Platinum membership tier” audience.

In the Data Graph, Households and Pets are defined as entities and are represented as separate tables in your data warehouse.

Relationships are defined between:

• Profiles and Households
• Households and Pets

In the warehouse, pets.type is a column in the pets table. By filtering against the pets.type column for the “cat” value, marketers can return a list of users that have a cat.

Furthermore, adding the audience membership condition will allow marketers to further refine their audience to only include users who are part of the “Platinum membership tier” audience.

Use case 3: Build an audience of credit card holders with a certain number of transactions

To build this audience, you’ll need to define a nested entity condition to relate a Profile to their:

• Accounts entity
• Subscriptions entity where subscriptions.tier is “Premium”
• Transactions entity where transactions.count is greater than five

This nested entity condition has four levels of relationship depth.

In the Data Graph, Accounts, Credit Cards, and Transactions are defined as entities. Relationships are defined between:

• Profiles and Accounts
• Accounts and Credit Cards
• Credit Cards and Transactions

In the warehouse, subscriptions.tier is a column in the Subscriptions table, and transactions.count is a column in the Transactions table. By filtering against the subscriptions.tier column for the “Premium” value, and the transactions.count column for values greater than five, marketers can return a list of users that have a premium account where there are greater than five transactions.

Step 2: Activate your Linked Audience

You can use your Linked Audience to activate any actions-based destination. The steps below provide instructions on how to add a destination to your Linked Audience(s), and send an event that best matches your use case.

Step 2a: Add an action destination

To activate your Linked Audience, you first need to add an action destination.

From the Add destination window, select your destination and click Next.

Step 2b: Select event

After adding an actions-based destination, select what type of event you want to send to the destination. Events update the destination about changes to your entity or audiences. You can then use these actions to orchestrate campaigns in other tools.

You can send events:

• When an entity on a profile changes:
  • Entity Added
  • Entity Removed
• Based on profile audience membership updates:
  • Audience Entered
  • Audience Membership Changed
  • Audience Exited

Entity added

Send a Track event when the lowest entity branch matches the audience condition.

Example use cases:

• Send a reminder to a customer when a credit card associated with their profile has an outstanding balance.
• Notify a traveler when a flight associated with their profile is delayed.
• Notify a customer when a product associated with their profile’s wishlist is back in stock.

Entity removed

Send a Track event when an entity is removed because it no longer matches the audience conditions. Select your entity from the Select entity dropdown menu.

Example use cases:

• Send a confirmation to a customer when a credit card associated with their profile has been paid off.
• Send a confirmation to the primary doctor when each of their associated patients completes their annual check up.

Audience entered

Send a Track event when a profile enters the audience.

Example use cases:

• Send a congratulatory email when a travel qualifies for premium status.
• Send a discount to all customers with a particular product on their wishlist.

Audience exited

Send a Track event when the profile exits the audience.

Example use cases:

• Send an email to credit card owners to confirm that their credit cards have been paid in full.
• Send a confirmation to a patient when they have completed all their pre-screening forms.

Audience Membership Changed

Send an Identify event when a profile enters and exits the audience.

Example use case:

• Update a user profile in a destination with the most recent audience membership.

Step 2c: Select an action

Select the destination action to call when the event happens. Make sure the action you selected is relevant to the type of event you previously selected. For example, if you selected Audience Membership Changed, be sure your action is also an Identify event.

Segment displays available actions based on the destination action you’ve connected with your Linked Audience.

Visit the destination actions docs learn more about destination actions, and view available actions for your destination.

Step 2d: Configure the event

Configure your event and select additional properties to include in the event.

To configure your event:

1. Select additional properties to include in each event.
   • As you’re configuring your event, you can view a preview of the enriched event based on your property selections.
2. Map your event from your audience to your destination.
   • Braze, Iterable, and Customer.io are pre-set destinations, so you won’t need to map your audience to your destination.
3. Select if you’d like to send events for current profiles and entities in the audience.
   • This is only available for the entity added, audience entered, and audience membership changed event types.
4. After configuring, click Save to enable your Linked Audience.

Send events for current profiles and entities in the audience

This box is unchecked by default. If you leave this box unchecked, Segment only sends events for new profiles and entities that match the audience conditions.

However, if you select this checkbox, Segment will also send events for profiles and entities that currently match the audience description.

Step 3: Confirm the payload in your destination

Linked Audiences sends events to your destination after Segment computes the audience.

To confirm your destination is receiving events, Segment recommends that you log in to your destination and perform one of the following:

• Monitor the event activity
• Search for the UserID or Event Name (for example, Entity Added)