How Audience Builder and Complex Audience Builder Work Together to Create Complex Queries

What Happens When You Create An Audience

Imagine that your Ascent360 CDP can be represented in one giant data table. This data table, or client view, has many fields (see your Data Dictionary for a complete list), which combines multiple different sources of data. That table would look like the following:

When you build an audience, you are essentially combining filters on this data table to create audiences of people who took certain actions (made a purchase, signed up for email newsletters, attended a lesson or event, etc.) and/or have certain attributes (demographics, geographic, and aggregate interaction data). As you can see in the above table, not every field is filled out in each row - that's because certain fields are reserved for certain types of actions (i.e. "Reservation Date" is only available for lodging transactions, "Transaction Date" is only available for monetary transactions). There are also fields that will always show the same data (per customer) in every row, like gender, age and Total Spent Lifetime. It is important to remember the way in which the data is formatted as you begin building your audiences.

Example Audience and Outputs

Individuals Who Purchased a 19-20 Season Pass

The below audience will return the following rows because these are the rows where both the Product Name is 'Season Pass' AND the Season Name is '19-20'. 

These are the 2 individuals who took the action of purchasing a 19-20 Season Pass.

Individuals with Over $1,000 Lifetime Spend who Purchased a 19-20 Season Pass

The above audience will return the following rows, because these are the rows where the Product Name is 'Season Pass' AND the Season Name is '19-20' AND the individuals' Total Spent Lifetime is between $1,000 and $10,000.

This is the 1 individual who took the action of purchasing a 19-20 Season Pass and has over a $1,000 Total Spent Lifetime:

Combining Individuals Who Took Different Actions

Individuals with a Reservation Date in January 2020 OR a Transaction Date in November 2019

The below audience will return the following rows because these are the rows where either the transaction date is in November 2019 OR the reservation date is in January 2020. You will notice that John Doe appears here twice, once because he purchased an item in November 2019 and once because he reserved a room in January 2020.

Individuals with a Reservation Date in January 2020 AND a Transaction Date in November 2019

So, what if you want to find only individuals like John, who made a purchase in November 2019 and reserved a room in January 2020? You may think switching the OR operator to an AND operator would give you results:

But actually, this audience is now looking for rows where BOTH the Transaction Date and Reservation Date have conflicting dates, which do not exist within the same line item in our CDP data table. So how do you identify the individuals who took these actions? The answer lies in Complex Audience Builder, where you can combine audiences to identify individuals in both. To create this Complex Audience, you first need to create 2 audiences: November 2019 Purchasers and January 2020 Lodging Reservations.

November 2019 Purchasers

Output

January 2020 Lodging Reservations

Output

Creating Your Individuals with a Reservation Date in January 2020 AND a Transaction Date in November 2019 Complex Audience

Once you've done the basic setup of your Complex Audience, select the New Complex Audience step. To configure a complex audience to select only individuals in both audiences, drag both audiences onto the canvas. By default, the operator selected is AND, which is the operator that should be used for this Complex Audience.

When you hit the refresh button on this Complex Audience, the tool goes to your two audiences, finds all individuals (based on LTGID) who are in the November 2019 Purchasers audience and compares those individuals to the ones in the January 2020 Lodging Reservations audience, and returns only the individuals who exist in both audiences. This becomes your Complex Audience output.

November 2019 Purchasers Audience Output

January 2020 Lodging Reservations Audience Output

Combined Complex Audience Output

Suppressing Individuals 

What if you're trying to find people who purchased a season pass in 19-20 and remove anyone who purchased a pass for 20-21? You might think this audience configuration would work to identify lapsed passholders.

But what you'll find is that returns the same 2 rows, because these are the rows where the Product Name is 'Season Pass' AND the Season Name is '19-20' and NOT any of the rows where the Season Name is '20-21.' So, how do you identify lapsed passholders in Ascent360? By creating a complex audience consisting of 2 audiences - one that contains all of your 19-20 passholders, and one that contains all of your 20-21 passholders, as shown below.

19-20 Passholder Audience & Output

Audience

Output

20-21 Passholder Audience & Output

Audience

Output

Once your audiences are created, it is time to create your Complex Audience.

Creating your Lapsed Passholder Complex Audience

Once you've done the basic setup of your Complex Audience, select the New Complex Audience step. To configure a complex audience to select only individuals in both audiences, drag both audiences onto the canvas. By default, the operator selected is NOT, which is the operator that should be used for this Complex Audience.

When you hit the "refresh" button on this Complex Audience, the tool goes to your two audiences, finds all individuals (based on LTGID) who are in the 19-20 Passholders audience and compares those individuals to the ones in the 20-21 Passholders audience, and returns only the individuals who exist in 19-20 Passholders who do not exist in 20-21 Passholders. This becomes your campaign output.

19-20 Audience Output

Output

20-21 Audience Output

Combined Complex Audience Output