Segment population smaller than onboarded trait population - Why?

[#1]

Hello everyone,

my name is Christophe and I'm part of the Audience manager Support team. It's been a while now since I have thought of adding some content to the community in the shape and form of blog entries but never had the chance or the time to properly do it.

Last week I had a use case which I found very interesting and I thought I'd try to document it here so that it is available to everyone.

While this might become a series of sorts, the primary goal here is to document a question / use case for which myself, other Support team members or even Engineering have looked into to find a solution, suggestion or explanation.

I often see having an issue with a product as a learning opportunity and I'm sure many of you may sometimes be in a situation whereby you are looking for resources that might explain an unexpected behaviour in Adobe Audience Manager. With that in mind, let's dive right in with today's use case:

Statement:

Segment population is smaller than onboarded trait population composing it - Why?

Configuration:

Segment using Authenticated Profile Merge Rule + Profile Link

The trait in question was recently onboarded and is presenting numbers in excess of 210,000+ Total Trait Population

Segment however, despite an increasing trend has a much smaller Total Segment Population:

Explanation:

To qualify for a segment, devices must have been seen by Audience Manager on our edge data servers after the segment was created. ie: it is assessing the real-time activity only. As such, no matter what population you have for onboarded traits, the corresponding segment will have a different population.

In this case, Keystone will send all the data about that user to that specific EDGE, including that onboarded trait.

Next time the users makes activity on the same EDGE (at least 1 day after), the segment will be evaluated on that edge correctly because the needed trait will be present on that EDGE.

So, the SEGMENT is evaluated on EDGE only for those users which are active.

vs

The trait is onboarded for all users, regardless they are active or not.

This is why the population is different and as you can see from the above screenshot the segment total population is increasing as users have online activity.

Also see Profile Merge Rules and Device Graph FAQ

+ Understanding the Edge Data Center

Any comments are welcome on this post so please let me know if this is something you think might be useful in the long run. I certainly hope it is.

Again this is specific to a particular request or situation and this is for your information. If running into a similar issue and wanting some help or confirmation, please start a new thread on the forum's main page so the community can try and help or if too specific, please contact Customer Care to open a Support request.

Thank you,

--

Christophe