Activate audiences to batch profile export destinations

Overview overview

This article explains the workflow required to activate audiences in Adobe Experience Platform to batch profile file-based destinations, such as cloud storage and email marketing destinations.

Prerequisites prerequisites

To activate audiences to destinations, you must have successfully connected to a destination. If you haven’t done so already, go to the destinations catalog, browse the supported destinations, and configure the destination that you want to use.

Supported file formats for export supported-file-formats-export

The following file formats are supported when exporting audiences:

Note that exporting CSV files gives you greater flexibility in terms of how you want to structure your exported files. Read more about file formatting configuration for CSV files.

Select your desired file format for export when creating a connection to the file-based destination.

Select your destination select-destination

Select your audiences select-audiences

To select the audiences that you want to activate to the destination, use the check boxes to the left of the audience names, then select Next.

You can select from multiple types of audiences, depending on their origin:

Schedule audience export scheduling

Adobe Experience Platform exports data for email marketing and cloud storage destinations as different file types. In the Scheduling page, you can configure the schedule and the file names for each audience you are exporting.

Experience Platform automatically sets a default schedule for each file export. You can modify the default schedule according to your needs, by selecting the pencil icon next to each schedule, and defining a custom schedule.

Export full files export-full-files

Select Export full files to trigger the export of a file containing a full snapshot of all profile qualifications for the selected audience.

Export incremental files

Select Export incremental files to trigger an export where the first file is a full snapshot of all profile qualifications for the selected audience, and subsequent files are incremental profile qualifications since the previous export.

Configure file names

For most destinations, the default file names consist of destination name, audience ID, and a date and time indicator. For example, you can edit your exported file names to distinguish between different campaigns or to have the data export time appended to the files. Note that some destination developers might select to have different default file name append options shown for their destinations.

To open a modal window and edit the file names, select the pencil icon. File names are limited to 255 characters.

In the file name editor, you can select different components to add to the file name.

The destination name and audience ID cannot be removed from file names. In addition to these options, you can add the following options:

Select Apply changes to confirm your selection.

Once you have finished configuring all your audiences, select Next to continue.

Mapping mapping

In this step, you must select the profile attributes that you want to add to the files exported to the target destination. To select profile attributes and identities for export:

Mandatory attributes mandatory-attributes

A mandatory attribute is a user-enabled checkbox which ensures all profile records contain the selected attribute. For example: all exported profiles contain an email address.​

You can mark attributes as mandatory to ensure that Platform exports only the profiles that include the specific attribute. As a result, it can be used as an additional form of filtering. Marking an attribute as mandatory is not required.

Not selecting a mandatory attribute exports all qualified profiles regardless of their attributes.

It is recommended that one of the attributes is a unique identifier from your schema. For more information about mandatory attributes, see the identity section in the Email marketing destinations documentation.

Deduplication keys deduplication-keys

A deduplication key is a user-defined primary key which determines the identity by which users want their profiles to be deduplicated.​

Deduplication keys eliminate the possibility of having multiple records of the same profile in one export file.

There are three ways you can use deduplication keys in Platform:

Deduplication example deduplication-example

This example illustrates how deduplication works, depending on the selected deduplication keys.

Let’s consider the following two profiles.

Profile A

{
  "identityMap": {
    "Email": [
      {
        "id": "johndoe_1@example.com"
      },
      {
        "id": "johndoe_2@example.com"
      }
    ]
  },
  "segmentMembership": {
    "ups": {
      "fa5c4622-6847-4199-8dd4-8b7c7c7ed1d6": {
        "status": "realized",
        "lastQualificationTime": "2021-03-10 10:03:08"
      }
    }
  },
  "person": {
    "name": {
      "lastName": "Doe",
      "firstName": "John"
    }
  },
  "personalEmail": {
    "address": "johndoe@example.com"
  }
}

Profile B

{
  "identityMap": {
    "Email": [
      {
        "id": "johndoe_1@example.com"
      },
      {
        "id": "johndoe_2@example.com"
      }
    ]
  },
  "segmentMembership": {
    "ups": {
      "fa5c4622-6847-4199-8dd4-8b7c7c7ed1d6": {
        "status": "realized",
        "lastQualificationTime": "2021-04-10 11:33:28"
      }
    }
  },
  "person": {
    "name": {
      "lastName": "D",
      "firstName": "John"
    }
  },
  "personalEmail": {
    "address": "johndoe@example.com"
  }
}

Deduplication use case 1: no deduplication deduplication-use-case-1

Using no deduplication, the export file would contain the following entries.

Deduplication use case 2: deduplication based on identity namespace deduplication-use-case-2

Assuming deduplication by the Email namespace, the export file would contain the following entries. Profile B is the latest one that qualified for the audience, so it is the only one getting exported.

Deduplication use case 3: deduplication based on a single profile attribute deduplication-use-case-3

Assuming deduplication by the personal Email attribute, the export file would contain the following entry. Profile B is the latest one that qualified for the audience, so it is the only one getting exported.

Deduplication use case 4: deduplication based on two profile attributes deduplication-use-case-4

Assuming deduplication by the composite key personalEmail + lastName, the export file would contain the following entries.

Adobe recommends selecting an identity namespace such as a CRM ID or email address as a deduplication key, to ensure all profile records are uniquely identified.

BetaExport arrays through calculated fields export-arrays-calculated-fields

Select beta customers can export array objects from Experience Platform to cloud storage destinations. Read more about exporting arrays and calculated fields and contact your Adobe representative to get access to the functionality.

Known limitations known-limitations

The new Mapping page has the following known limitations:

Audience membership attribute cannot be selected through the mapping workflow

Due to a known limitation, you cannot currently use the Select field window to add segmentMembership.status to your file exports. Instead, you need to manually paste the value xdm: segmentMembership.status into the schema field, as shown below.

File exports will vary in the following ways, depending on whether segmentMembership.status is selected:

Read more about profile export behavior for file-based destinations.

Identity namespaces cannot currently be selected for exports

Selecting identity namespaces for export, as shown in the image below, is currently not supported. Selecting any identity namespaces for export will result in an error in the Review step.

As a temporary workaround if you need to add identity namespaces to your exported files during the beta, you can either:

Select profile attributes select-attributes

For profile-based destinations, you must select the profile attributes that you want to send to the target destination.

IMPORTANT

Due to a known limitation, you cannot currently use the Select field window to add segmentMembership.status to your file exports. Instead, you must manually paste the value xdm: segmentMembership.status into the schema field, as shown below.

File exports vary in the following ways, depending on whether segmentMembership.status is selected:

Select enrichment attributes select-enrichment-attributes

Enrichment attributes correspond to custom uploaded audiences ingested in Experience Platform as Custom uploads. In this step, you can select which attributes you would like to export to your destination, for each selected external audience.

Follow the steps below to select enrichment attributes for each external audience:

If you want to activate external audiences to your destinations without exporting any attribute, enable the Exclude enrichment attributes toggle. This option exports the profiles from the external audiences, but none of their corresponding attributes are sent to your destination.

Select Next to move to the Review step.

Review review

On the Review page, you can see a summary of your selection. Select Cancel to break up the flow, Back to modify your settings, or Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

Consent policy evaluation consent-policy-evaluation

If your organization purchased Adobe Healthcare Shield or Adobe Privacy & Security Shield, select View applicable consent policies to see which consent policies are applied and how many profiles are included in the activation as a result of them. Read about consent policy evaluation for more information.

Data usage policy checks data-usage-policy-checks

In the Review step, Experience Platform also checks for any data usage policy violations. Shown below is an example where a policy is violated. You cannot complete the audience activation workflow until you have resolved the violation. For information on how to resolve policy violations, read about data usage policy violations in the data governance documentation section.

Filter audiences filter-audiences

Also in this step you can use the available filters on the page to display only the audiences whose schedule or mapping has been updated as part of this workflow. You can also toggle which table columns you want to see.

If you are satisfied with your selection and no policy violations have been detected, select Finish to confirm your selection and start sending data to the destination.

Verify audience activation verify

When exporting audiences to cloud storage destinations, Adobe Experience Platform creates a .csv, .json, or .parquet file in the storage location that you provided. Expect a new file to be created in your storage location according to the schedule you set in the workflow. The default file format is shown below, but you can edit the components of the file name:
<destinationName>_segment<segmentID>_<timestamp-yyyymmddhhmmss>.csv

For example, if you selected a daily export frequency, the files you would receive on three consecutive days could look like this:

Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200408061804.csv
Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200409052200.csv
Salesforce_Marketing_Cloud_segment12341e18-abcd-49c2-836d-123c88e76c39_20200410061130.csv

The presence of these files in your storage location is confirmation of successful activation. To understand how the exported files are structured, you can download a sample .csv file. This sample file includes the profile attributes person.firstname, person.lastname, person.gender, person.birthyear, and personalEmail.address.