Do TTL for profiles affect CJA stitching?

[JaniceAk]

Hi,

I'm wondering if a TTL (time to live) for specific type of events within profiles in AEP (leveraged by both Audience Manager and CJA) affect what events are being used to stitch identities for CJA? Wondering if, when a TTL is established for profile events from a dataset, and it eliminates events from the dataset in profiles that would be needed as reference for stitching-- past that TTL time range-- would it indeed affect graph-based stitching in CJA? I.e. even though X days ago someone's ID got stitched w primary ID in their profile, once the TTL hits after that X days then the stitching reference goes away.

Or, does the TTL does not affect how graph-based stitching is done for CJA, and it only affects the events that appear for a profile when building an audience in Audience Manager?

[Vinay_Chauhan]

Hi @JaniceAk 

The TTL setting applies to how long certain profile events or attributes are retained in AEP and Audience Manager for audience evaluation. Once the TTL period expires, those events no longer appear in the profile for segmentation or activation purposes.

However, this does not undo or break identity stitching in CJA. When an identity link is first established (for example, when a device ID is stitched to a primary customer ID), that relationship is stored in the identity graph. The identity graph maintains those connections independently of TTL rules, so even if the original event that created the link is no longer visible in the profile, the stitching itself remains intact for analysis in CJA.

In short, TTL affects what you see and use when building audiences in AEP or Audience Manager, but it does not retroactively impact the way CJA resolves identities once they’ve been stitched.

[JaniceAk]

Thanks for this information, Vinay. Regarding CJA's capability of sending audience segments back into Audience Manager-- is it possible to use events that exist in CJA but have an expired TTL in Audience Manager, for segments that are sent back into Audience Manager? For example, a user has web events that have technically expired in profile, but still appear in reporting in CJA. How does the profile in AEP reconcile those events when pulled back in from CJA?

[Vinay_Chauhan]

When audiences are shared from CJA into Audience Manager (or AEP), what actually gets passed over are the segment qualifications based on CJA’s reporting data not the underlying raw events. If an event has aged out of profile due to TTL, it won’t reappear in the profile when CJA sends a segment back. Instead, the profile will only reflect the fact that the individual currently qualifies for the audience segment.

So in your example, even though expired web events can still be used for analysis and audience definition in CJA, once the audience is pushed into Audience Manager, the profile in AEP will not “re-hydrate” those expired events. It simply holds the segment membership flag.

We can say that - CJA reporting can leverage historical events, but TTL rules in AEP still govern what persists in profiles. Audience sharing passes the qualification status, not the expired events themselves.