How to Activate an Audience to a Destination

Lookout is currently in Public Beta. Contact the Product team if you have any questions.

An audience is only useful once it reaches the tools your team runs campaigns in. Activating one creates a sync: a connection that keeps the audience current in a destination as people join and leave it.

Before you start

• The audience is saved and its size is current. Activate stays out of reach otherwise, and the button says which one is missing.
• Your Lookout workspace is linked to a RudderStack workspace. Activating creates a source and a destination there, which the link is set up to do.
• The destination platform already has an account connected in RudderStack.

Create the sync

Select Activate on the audience and work through the four steps.

Select destination type

Pick the platform the audience is going to:

Gainsight PX Audience and HubSpot Audience destinations are currently in Private Beta.

Reach out to Customer Success to enable these destinations for your workspace.

See the following guides for more information on their setup:

• Gainsight PX Audience
• HubSpot Audience

Select account

Choose which of your connected accounts for that platform to send through. Only accounts that suit the destination you picked are offered.

If you see No accounts for this destination, that platform has no connected account in your RudderStack workspace yet. Configure a valid account for that destination in RudderStack and try again.

Configure sync

Choose the ad account, then the audience on the destination side. Where the destination has an ad account, the audience choice stays disabled until you pick it.

• For Braze, give an Audience attribute name instead, and membership is stored on that custom attribute.
• For Gainsight PX, give the Attribute API name of a Boolean custom user attribute that already exists in Gainsight PX. Members who are not yet Gainsight PX users are reported as failed rows until they exist in Gainsight PX; no users are created.
• For HubSpot Audience, there is no ad account. Choose a static contact list.
• For Pinterest Audience, Pinterest needs at least 100 matched users before an audience can be used for targeting, and it can take 48–72 hours to process an upload.

For list-based destinations, choose whether Lookout creates the audience for you or syncs into one you already have:

Create new list options

• Enter a list name. Facebook Custom Audience, LinkedIn Audience, Pinterest Audience, TikTok Audience, Reddit Audience, Google Ads Remarketing List, and Iterable Audience require at least 3 characters (at most 500 for Reddit and Pinterest). For HubSpot, the name must be non-blank and at most 1,000 characters. An optional description is also available (Reddit and Pinterest have no description).
• You don’t need to create the audience in the ad platform first.
• For HubSpot, the list name is prefilled from the audience name and you can edit it before submitting.
• For Pinterest, Lookout creates a customer list and a customer list audience on it in the selected ad account.

Use existing list options

• Pick an audience or list that already exists in the destination.
• For HubSpot, only static contact lists are eligible.
• For Pinterest, only customer list audiences are eligible.

When you create a new Google Ads list, also choose its user list type. You cannot change it later.

Then Map identifiers — say which column in your audience carries the email, phone number, or user ID the destination matches people on. Some platforms ask for one more choice here, such as whether the LinkedIn audience describes people or companies. For Pinterest, map an email address, a mobile advertising ID (MAID), or both — phone numbers aren’t supported.

Sync schedule

Decide how the audience refreshes:

• Run syncs automatically: Choose how often the audience refreshes
• Run syncs manually: Nothing runs until you start it

Every destination syncs in mirror mode.

Membership is kept in step continuously, so someone who leaves the audience is removed on the destination side at the next run — or, in Braze and Gainsight PX, has the attribute set to false.

Select Enable sync to finish. If you chose Create new, Lookout creates the audience or list in the destination at this point.

Note that:

• If the destination refuses to create the audience or list — for example, because the name is already in use in Google Ads — Lookout shows the destination’s reason. Change the name or choose Use existing.
• If the list is created but the sync can’t be set up, Lookout switches to Use existing with the new list selected, so you can select Enable sync again without creating a duplicate.
• For Pinterest, if the customer list is created but its audience isn’t, Lookout names the customer list it created when Pinterest identifies it. Do not create the audience again, as that makes another list. Create an audience on that customer list in Pinterest Ads Manager, then choose Use existing audience.

Watch it run

The Activations setting in the left sidebar lists every sync in the workspace, so you can see what is failing without opening each audience. Rows show the activation, its schedule, its last run, and when it was last updated.

Click an audience to see more details on the latest run — how many records were Added, Deleted, and Updated, how many synced successfully, and anything that failed or was dropped. Past runs is the history.

A run reports one of four states:

Run sync starts a run immediately, whatever the schedule says.

Editing an audience definition doesn’t refresh the destination straight away. The new definition is stored, and the destination catches up on the next run.

Change or remove a sync

Editing reopens the last two steps of the audience activation process, so you can change the mapping or the schedule. The audience choice stays on Use existing with the current audience selected — you can’t create a new audience from an edit.

To stop shipping an audience, delete its activation — this removes the connection Lookout created. However, the audience already present in the destination is not deleted, even if Lookout created it. It stops updating and stays usable there, so remove it in the destination if you no longer want it used.

Important considerations

• The destination type and the accounts are fixed once a sync exists. To move an audience to a different account, delete the sync and create a new one.
• For Gainsight PX, the attribute API name is also fixed once an activation exists. To use a different attribute, create a new activation.
• An audience that still has activations can’t be deleted. Remove them first.