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RudderStack Audiences

This guide introduces you to the concept of Audiences and shows how to use them with your Profiles project.

Overview

RudderStack’s Audiences feature lets you create target customer lists or a subset of users satisfying specific criteria, with easy-to-use filters on your warehouse tables. Once created, you can connect and activate these audiences in your RudderStack-supported destinations.

For example, you can create an audience and send that data to the downstream digital advertising destinations to:

• Retarget all users from a specific city, state, or region to improve repeat sales.
• Prompt active customers on your sports website to buy season tickets.
• Run campaigns to grow product usage and retain users.

Marketing teams can leverage this feature to query and sync audiences without having to work with SQL and warehouses or rely on their data engineers.

Key features

The Profiles Audiences feature is built to help Marketing teams create and activate audiences independently without any technical bottlenecks. It also helps Data teams maintain control over data quality and definitions while empowering their Marketing team.

Some key features of the Profiles Audiences feature are listed below:

Visual audience builder

• Create customer segments based on specific attributes like age, email, purchase history, etc.
• Combine multiple audience filtering conditions using AND or OR logic
• See real-time previews of of the audience that matches your criteria

Built on your data foundation

• Works with foundational cohorts — pre-built customer segments created by your data team.
• Uses clean, reliable data from your data warehouse.
• Ensures everyone in your organization works from the same customer definitions.

Preview and verify

• See sample customers who match your audience criteria
• View total audience size
• Verify your audience is correct before activating

Self-service for Marketing teams

• No need to wait for data engineers to create segments
• Easy to activate — send your audiences directly to marketing tools (email platforms, ad networks, etc.)
• Save and reuse audiences for future campaigns
• Share audiences with team members

Create a new audience

Before you create audiences

Make sure Cohorts are already set up in your Profiles project, as they act as the foundation to create audiences.

RudderStack provides a seamless UI to build audiences without any prior knowledge of SQL or how to store the data.

Initial setup

1. Log in to your RudderStack dashboard.
2. From the left navigation bar, go to Unify > Audiences and click the Create audience button on the top right corner.
3. Click Create a new audience.

4. You will see a list of cohorts from your existing Profiles projects.

Foundational cohorts represent your core customer segments — they are set up within your Profiles project by the data team. You can create new audiences by filtering these cohorts.

5. Select the cohort on top of which you want to create the audience. Then, click Continue.

Configure audience conditions

1. Specify the Audience name and assign an optional Description for the audience.
2. Click Add group condition to start adding the filtering logic. You will see the following three filtering options:

You can select ALL or ANY to implement the AND or OR operator respectively between the different filtering conditions.

3. Click Add filter to add multiple filters within a condition.

4. Click Add group condition to add multiple group filters.

5. After setting the required filtering conditions, click Run Preview in the right sidebar to:

   • Preview the data by selecting a specific identifier (user_id, email, rudder_id, etc.)
   • View the corresponding Audiences SQL and Features SQL queries — these queries are helpful in case you need to share them with your data team for observability or troubleshooting.

Note that:

• You can preview the data by selecting a specific identifier (user_id, email, rudder_id, etc.) — the audience is created using that ID as the primary identifier.
• Fetching the preview data may take some time (even minutes) depending on the data size and query complexity.

6. Click Create audience to create the audience.

Connect audience to destination

You can activate the audience by connecting it to:

• A new downstream destination
• An existing destination

Select identifier

1. Once you choose to connect to a new or existing destination, you will be prompted to select the identifier used to sync records to that destination. You will see all the identifiers present in your Profiles project in this list. Some examples are:

• email
• user_id
• temp_id
• anonymous_id
• rudder_id

Which identifier should I use?

While most destinations accept email as an identifier, make sure to check the relevant destination’s documentation for specific requirements.

2. Click Confirm to proceed.

To connect the audience to a destination at a later stage, click Done on the top right corner.

Important considerations

Note the following while creating Profiles audiences:

• To create an audience, you must have previously run the Profiles project at least once.
• The audience definitions do not go stale — they get updated every time you run the Profiles project.

Do not delete or rename the foundational cohort as it will impact all the audiences created on top of it.

Manage audience

This section explains how to update your audience configuration and connections with downstream destinations.

Update audience conditions

1. Go to Unify > Audiences, select your audience, and go to the Configurations tab.
2. Click the Edit button to update the audience conditions.
3. Specify the new filtering conditions for details.
4. Click Run Preview to preview the data and validate the filtering conditions.
5. Click Save to save the changes.

Connect destinations

1. Go to Unify > Audiences, select your audience, and go to the Destinations tab.
2. Click the Add destination button. Then, specify whether you want to connect the audience to a new or existing destination.
3. Select the identifier used to sync records to that destination.
4. Click Confirm to proceed.
5. Configure the destination-specific settings and complete the setup.

Clone an audience

You can also clone an existing Profiles Audience to create a new audience by changing or updating the filtering conditions.

1. In the RudderStack dashboard, go to Unify > Audiences and click the Create audience button on the top right corner.
2. Click Clone an existing audience.

3. Select the previously-created audience from the list.
4. Specify the new filtering conditions.
5. Click Run Preview to preview the data and validate the filtering conditions.
6. Click Create audience to create the audience.

Supported destinations

RudderStack supports the Profiles Audiences feature for the following destinations:

Facebook Custom Audience

Google Ads Remarketing Lists (Customer Match)

Questions? Contact us by Email or on Slack