Ascent360 employs an in-depth sanitation, matching, and de-duplication process to determine a "Golden Record" each time data is loaded to your platform. This article explains the counts you may find in Ascent360.
How Ascent360 Imports Data
Counts within the Audience Selector (as with the rest of the CDP) are based on Individuals. An Individual in Ascent360 is any record that has a name and contactable information that could be used for marketing purposes. Data relating to transactions, bookings, lift scans, etc. will only be imported if it can be tied back to a contactable customer (Individuals are the center of Ascent360's database model). For this reason,
Ascent360 does not expect counts within the Platform to match the counts of your Operational Systems. For more information on Ascent360's definition of an Individual, please see What is an "Individual" in Ascent360?
Why are my Audience Builder counts different than expected?
The counts in your database may be different than expected due to the matching and de-duping that happens upon each load to the Ascent360 Marketing Platform. Ascent360 presents a cleaned & consolidated version of the data from your source system(s), prioritizing data that is able to be leveraged for marketing purposes.
- To be included in the Ascent360 Platform, an individual needs to have either an email address or postal address associated with their record.
- In general, phone-only contacts will not be imported.
Why are my counts relating to transactions different than expected?
If your integration includes data from a Point-of-Sale (POS) or e-Commerce system, Ascent360 will import transaction data that can be attributed to contactable individuals. Ascent360 will not import transactions from non-contactable customers. Similarly, if an existing individual makes a new purchase but the transaction is not tied to the existing customer in the source system, this transaction will not be attributed to the customer in Ascent360.
The Audience Builder always displays counts of individuals, not transactions. For example, an audience that shows a raw count of 230 for Department Name = Bikes displays the number of distinct individuals with contactable data that have purchased Bikes, not strictly the number of bike-related transactions.
Ascent360 captures 3 years of historical transactions from your source system to load into the database. We find that data relating to historical transactions is most useful up to 3 years in the past; marketing efforts that are based on purchases more than 3 years ago are ineffective in most verticals. Ascent360 captures all years of historical customers. For businesses with many years of transaction history, the following effects from this practice may be accentuated:
- Your Database prospects (individuals who do not have an attributed purchase) may be inflated. For marketing, a customer who made one or more purchases more than 3 years ago should effectively be treated as a prospect.
- The Total Lifetime Spend (and Total Number of Transactions) for customers may be lower than expected.
Remember that Ascent360 presents a consolidated database with counts that are relevant for Marketing Purposes. The Ascent360 Marketing Platform is not intended to present an exact reflection of your Operational System(s).
Should you have any questions, reach out to our Help Desk at support@ascent360.com.
