User segments

Audience segments represents a group of users and are central to most marketing actions. Users can be grouped by common profile characteristics, or similar behavior in their online browsing or in their purchases. Users can be grouped either using the mediarithmics platform, or externally and then imported.

Here is a list of audience segment types that differ from each other by the method used to group users:

• Audience segments calculated from a query (type USER QUERY). Several tools are provided to define this type of segment. Occasional platform users will find it easier to use the Audience Builder. More advanced users such as data admin or data analyst will find a greater wealth of expression in the Segment Builder. Finally, technical users, data engineers or integrators, can directly use a textual query language (see OTQL).

• Audience segments imported from an external system (type USER LIST)

• Audience segments calculated from a likeness prediction algorithm (type USER LOOKALIKE)

• Audience segments associated with the events of a campaign (eg: all the people exposed to a given video campaign) (type USER ACTIVATION)

• Audience segments associated with A / B tests (control group and test group)

Audience Segment & User Segments

An audience segment represents a group of users. A user segment is a piece of information that is associated with a user to indicate that this user belongs to the segment.

For example, if an audience segment has 10,000 users, each user has a user segment to signify their membership in this segment. So there are 10,000 user segments, one for each user in the segment.

In the data schema this information element is materialized in the form of an object of type User Segment (see standard datamart schema). This object contains the following information:

• The segment identifier

• The date the user entered the segment (creation date of the user segment object)

• The expiration date at the end of which the user will exit the segment. This date is optional and is only entered for some types of segments.

Counting and Persistence of an audience segment of type User Query

When working with a User Query audience segment, it is important to understand the difference between the count of the segment and the persistence of this segment.

Counting consists of calculating the number of users who verify the segment's grouping rules. That is to say the users who respond positively to the conditions and to the boolean operators present in the segment query. The counting of a segment is done in real time. It usually only takes a few seconds (2-5 sec) to get a result.

However, if the count is immediate, the process of bringing all the targeted users into the segment by creating a User Segment type record for each of them may take more time. This time depends on the size of the segment, the segment refresh policy and the calculation budget allocated to the account.