Audiences

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 them 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/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.

Note that:

• The Audiences feature is available only in the RudderStack Cloud Growth and Enterprise plans.

• The following sources support Audiences:

  • BigQuery
  • Databricks
  • Redshift
  • Snowflake
  • Trino

Key features

RudderStack provides audience-building capabilities in its Reverse ETL pipeline where you can:

• Create and sync a single audience to multiple downstream systems, which is very time-consuming to do manually.
• Analyze the results of multichannel campaigns in a single place at the data warehouse.
• Trust the audience data as a single source of truth and have complete control over the ecosystem.
• Fast-track the process for marketing teams who would otherwise need to work with SQL and warehouses or rely on data engineers to query and sync audiences.
• Avoid updating the audience every time or debugging issues while building audiences using proprietary tools, saving time.

Create audience

RudderStack provides a visual Audience builder tool in its dashboard, which you can use to build audiences without any prior knowledge of SQL or how to store the data.

1. Log in to your RudderStack dashboard.
2. From the left navigation bar, go to Activate > Audiences and click New audience.
3. Enter the settings explained in the following sections.

Name your audience

• Audience name: Enter a unique name for your audience.
• Description: Enter a description for your audience.

Click Save and Continue to move to the next step.

Audience setup

• Warehouse: Select your warehouse from the dropdown. To add a new warehouse, click Add warehouse.

To set up a new warehouse from scratch, see the warehouse-specific documentation for the connection settings.

• Schema: Select the database schema.
• Table: Select the required table.

Click Save and Continue to move to the next step.

Set your conditions

You can set the required filtering conditions, view the corresponding SQL query and preview the resultant data from your data filters:

You can add multiple filters within a condition by clicking Add condition or add multiple group filters by clicking Add group condition. Select All or Any to implement the AND or OR operator respectively between different filtering conditions.

Click Save and Continue to finish setting up your audience.

Connect audience

Once you have created an audience, you can connect it to the required destination by clicking the Connect your audience button in the audience’s Connections tab.

Once you select a destination, enter the connection settings, map your data columns, and schedule the jobs to sync data to the destination.

Supported destinations

You can connect an audience to the following destinations:

Audience identifier

RudderStack requires an audience identifier when mapping your audience to destinations that don’t support audiences by default, for example, Salesforce, Customer.io, HubSpot, etc. It picks up this identifier from the Audience identifier setting in the dashboard while setting up the data mapping.

Note that:

• You will see the Audience identifier setting while connecting your audience to all the supported destinations except Facebook Custom Audience and Google Adwords Remarketing Lists, which have audience support by default.
• The value of Audience identifier is pre-populated in the dashboard. However, you can change it as required.

RudderStack sets the user traits with the provided Audience identifier as the key. It sets the value of the trait to either true or false depending on whether the user is a member of the defined audience.

FAQ

Can I create a filter on the JSON columns in my warehouse table?

Yes, you can. Select the Custom SQL filter option from the dropdown and enter the corresponding SQL query, which includes the relevant filtering condition for the JSON column:

Questions? Contact us by email or on Slack