Analytics to Experience Cloud audience sharing cap

[#1]

When looking into creating segments in Adobe Analytics to feed personalisation through Target, I discovered there was a limit of 20, as per below:

You must limit the number of audiences shared from Analytics to 20 to avoid additional processing delays. Audiences shared to the Experience Cloud from Analytics cannot exceed 20 million unique members. Also, due to caching, deleted report suites in Analytics require 12 hours before the deletion is shown in the Experience Cloud.

Some questions off the back of that

1. What does ‘processing delays’ mean if we were to go over 20? What is the actual impact to personalised experiences?
2. If we had 50 shared audiences from Analytics but didn't exceed 20 million unique members, would that work?

Look forward to your responses!

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi Chris,

A popular use case for non-real time segment sharing is - when you create an audience segment in the target, it collects data in real time, the only caveat is - it starts with zero audiences which grow with time...in such cases, if you are collecting data in Adobe Analytics since some time you can share adobe analytics audience segment with target to show your experiments to already qualified audience till the time your target audience grow to the desired level. In this case it makes sense to share new analytics audiences in every 24-48 hours.

However in the case when you have a real need to share Adobe analytics data with other marketing cloud solutions in real time - In my opinion, the best way going forward is to turn on server side forwarding in adobe analytics.

Server-side forwarding is designed for customers who want to share data from Analytics to other Experience Cloud Solutions in real time. When enabled, server-side forwarding also allows Analytics to push data to other Experience Cloud solutions and for those solutions to push data to Analytics during the data collection process.

Here are a few links which can help understand it better.

• Turn on Server-Side Forwarding
• Implementing Audience Manager via Server-Side Forwarding in Launch by Adobe
  

Thanks,

Asheesh

[#3]

To add to this, I just clicked on "related topics" on the right and found those two Q&As:

Re: How many Analytics segments can I share at any given time?

Re: Segment Limit in Analytics?

Both basically say to not go over 20 segments shared with Experience Cloud, but don't specify whether it is for usage in Audience Manager or Target or everything.

The tool did let me share 23 segments so far so it isn't strict but we want to fully understand what it means when used with Target for our customer experiences.

[#4]

Thanks Asheesh, this does provide more information than most sources I've been able to find.

So to summarise:

1. There is no limit to the number of Adobe Analytics segments that can be shared to Marketing Cloud, when used for Adobe Target
2. The 20 limit cap applies only to Adobe Analytics segments used with Adobe Audience Manager (DMP)
3. Whether the source of audience for Target is Adobe Analytics or Marketing Cloud, there is a delay of 24h to 48h before customer can benefit from the personalised Target experience, or be removed from a Target experience.

So how does one create near real time personalised experiences with Adobe?

[#5]

Hi Chris,

All great questions, I would like to share some info before I come to your questions -

• You know it already - By publishing a segment to the Experience Cloud, you can use the segment for marketing activity in the Audience library, Target, and Audience Manager.
• Processing time - Adobe analytics segment is not real-time means once a visitor qualifies for the audience shared from Analytics, there is a 24 - 48 hour delay before that information is actionable in Target, Media Optimizer, and Campaign. 
• Let's make it simple - In other worlds as soon as you create a segment in adobe analytics and publish it to experience cloud; it is available in other solutions to select but no data is shared immediately. This sharing is done through batch processing where adobe analytics create a file with the list of all the marketing cloud ids which qualifies for the analytics segment and share it with other solutions which ingest it further to use it internally.
• When the audience is associated with an active campaign in Target, Analytics begins sending IDs for visitors (not in real-time) that qualify for that Experience Cloud and Target audience. At that point, the audience name and corresponding data begin displaying on the Experience Cloud Audiences page.
• The window for audience creation - It is a rolling time window, not a fixed on the date of segment creation.

Answers to the questions you asked:

1. There is no limit to creating segments in Analytics. You can create as many segments as you want in Analytics to share them with the Marketing Cloud. Though, you can only use up to 20 of such segments (converted as traits) in Audience Manager segments. More segments mean more time to fully process analytics segment data. As you can not show experience to the user qualifies to analytics segment until it is ingested by the solution it has no impact over personalized experience.
   
2. There is a limit of max 20 million visitors (unique marketing cloud ids) a segment can share.

Thanks,

Asheesh