Custom Attributes for Audiences

It is often useful to add additional attributes to audiences for tracking purposes or to link them to internal concepts. Common use cases include:

• Categorizing audiences: Add a Program Name to your audiences to keep track of which audiences are used for each marketing program.
• Linking to campaigns: If an audience is used in a campaign, you can associate the corresponding campaign_id with that audience.
• Leveraging existing analytics assets: Add a custom attribute that serves as a join key to existing analytics tables that reference audience membership or personalization data.
• Including calculated attributes: Define attributes based on SQL logic.
• Including attributes from related datasets: Pull attributes from related datasets within the same dataset group as the audience.

For this reason, custom attributes can be defined in three different ways:

• A static text value
• A formula
• A field from a related table

Inherited Custom Attributes

If an audience is created from a Template, then all of its custom attributes (keys & definition) are also inherited by the audience. However, you can further modify or edit those inherited custom attributes.

Add Custom Attributes to an Audience

You can add custom attributes to a new audience, or an existing audience. Once you are on the Audience Canvas:

1. In the subheader menu select Settings

2. Under Additional Custom Attributes click Add Custom Attribute

   

3. Add your Label: The label is the name of the attribute. For example: "campaignid".

4. Pick the type: It can be Text, Attribute Formula or Related Dataset Field

5. Add your Value: The value changes depending on the type of custom attribute. For example: The actual campaign id you want to associate with this audience, when using a text value.

A few custom attribute examples

The following image includes a simple text attribute, an attribute formula attribute and two different related dataset attributes

Custom attributes can also be used in Journeys. For more information on how to define formula-based custom attributes and related-dataset custom attributes, see Custom Attributes for Journeys: https://docs.growthloop.com/docs/custom-attributes-journeys

Use Custom Attributes in your Data Cloud

When you export your audience to a destination, you can select custom attributes and include them as match fields, additional fields, or consent fields.

The custom attributes will be available in your destination. You can also access them directly in your data cloud:

• Within your flywheel_system dataset, query the snapshotting delta table for the audience where you added the custom attributes.
• Each custom attribute will have its own column, where:
  • Column Name: Contains the label provided for the custom attribute on the audience.
  • Value: Contains the value provided or calculated for the custom attribute on the audience.

If you have any questions on how to utilize custom attributes please let us know at [email protected]