About Audiences

Introduction

An audience represents a group of people and attributes about them. Audiences can use data from the cloud, data that is imported using a CSV file, or data from SAS 360 Direct. The data that you include in an audience is uploaded into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 for a period of time that you specify. As long as that data is not expired, you can use it throughout SAS Customer Intelligence 360 for personalization and targeting.

These are some of the benefits of using audiences:

• Using the right credentials, you can connect directly to your cloud data source and use criteria to query and upload only the attributes that you want to make available to SAS Customer Intelligence 360. You do not have to upload all of your customer data.
• An audience gives you more control to determine how long data remains in the application compared to other means of importing data into SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Other import options include transient files and customer data imports.
• The simplified approach of audiences allows organizations to automate data movement from their cloud database into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 without having to maintain ETL processes.

For example, you can use an audience to send an email to users with information about the balance on their account. You can then create a bulk push notification task that uses the same audience to follow up with those users.

Cloud Data

Create an audience from data that is in one of these data sources:

• Snowflake
• Google BigQuery
• Amazon Redshift
• PostgreSQL
• Azure SQL

1. An administrator creates a data connection to the external data source that you want to make available to SAS Customer Intelligence 360.
2. An administrator creates a data source that uses the data connection. The data source designates the tables or views and the columns that you want to make available to SAS Customer Intelligence 360. Creating a data source does not upload data to SAS Customer Intelligence 360.
3. Once the data source is ready, you can create an audience that uses the data that is defined in the data source. When your audience is run, data is uploaded into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and can be used throughout the application for personalization and targeting.

The data connection and data source are defined in the AdministrationData and Integrations page. The audience is created on the Audiences page.

Audience Definitions

Create an audience definition to integrate with data sources that SAS Customer Intelligence 360 does not have a direct connection to. In this case, you import the audience data by using a CSV file, and then you set the audience columns and properties in the audience definition. Here is a summary of the audience workflow if you are importing a CSV file to create an audience definition.

1. Create an audience definition by either using the API or the Audience Definitions page. This action automatically creates an audience with the same name as the definition.
2. Import audience data by uploading the CSV file.

On-Premises Data

Create an audience from an on-premises data source. Here is a summary of the audience workflow for data from SAS 360 Direct:

1. An administrator creates a data connection to a SAS 360 Direct data source.
2. An administrator creates a data source that uses the data connection. Creating a data source does not upload data to SAS Customer Intelligence 360.
3. Create an audience by using the data that is defined in the data source. When the audience is run, data is uploaded into SAS Customer Intelligence 360 and can be used throughout the application for personalization and targeting.

The data connection and data source are defined in the AdministrationData and Integrations page. The audience is created on the Audiences page.