Audience Syndication

The Audience Syndication feature of Blueshift lets you build and export custom audiences to paid media channels, such as Facebook, Google, Criteo, and other media partners across display, social, paid search, mobile, video, and OTT, to drive and improve upon your acquisition and reengagement strategies. A custom audience is also referred to as a tailored audience, a matched audience, or a third party audience.

You can use Blueshift’s powerful segmentation engine to build custom audiences using first party data gathered across your websites, apps, and other direct customer touch-points. You can then export this custom audience to improve ROAS (return on ad spend) on paid media platforms. With audience syndication, target audiences in integrated platforms are updated regularly and automatically without any manual download/upload of CSV files.

For example, you can create a specific target audience for your ads based on behavioral data and demographic data that you collect or you can create a segment of users who have completed a certain action or are low intent users and then use syndication to remove these users from the target audience and save ad spend.

Prerequisites

Before setting up a syndication, you must set up the integration with the advertising platform that you want to use from the App Hub.

For more information on the audience/advertising media platforms supported, see Pre-built integrations for syndication. 

Create the syndication

Creating the syndication involves the following steps:

1. Add the basic information
2. Select a destination platform
3. Select the audience
4. Set the syndication schedule

1. Add the basic syndication information

1. Click Audience Sync in the left navigation to go to the Syndications index page.
2. Click +SYNDICATION > Audience.
3. Specify a name for the syndication. This name is used for identification purposes and must be unique.
4. You can add tags to organize your marketing content. For example, you may want to group together syndications that use a specific segment.
5. Add email addresses of users who should receive an alert in case any errors occur in the syndication.
    

   

2. Select a destination platform

Complete the following steps to select the destination platform:

1. Select the Destination platform for the syndicated audience.
    

   

2. From the Choose integration drop-down list select the adapter to use. 
3. If you select a platform which has a direct integration with Blueshift, in Custom Audience Settings, you can “Sync with existing custom audience” or you can “Create and sync with new custom audience”.
   1. If you are syncing with existing custom audience, select the existing Custom Audience to sync with. Any changes to the segment (additions or removals) are exported to this audience.
   2. If you are creating a new audience, provide the Custom Audience Name and Custom Audience Description. A new audience is created on the platform and the segment is exported to this audience.

   

4. If you select a platform that is integrated with Blueshift through our partnership with LiveRamp, you must create a new audience.
   1. Add a Filename (Audience name).
   2. A new audience is created on the platform and the segment is exported to this audience.
   3. If you select the AdRoll platform, you must also provide the Segment ID of the segment on the AdRoll platform with which the segment on the Blueshift platform is to be synced.

   

5. Click Continue to specify the audience.

3. Select the audience

1. You have 2 options for determining the audience for the syndication job - (a) using a segment or (b) using a campaign journey. Set audience to 'determined by a segment' if you want customers to be added and removed from the destination automatically based on the segment criteria. On the other hand, set audience to 'determined by other campaigns' if you want to explicitly control which customers to add or remove from the destination using a campaign journey.
2. Additionally, you can specify whether to apply your global holdout group when syndicating customers to the destination. 
3. Click Continue to set the syndication scheduling options.
    

   

4. Set the syndication schedule

Complete the following steps to select the schedule for the syndication:

1. Set the following schedule parameters:
   • The Start Time indicates when this syndication will launch.
   • The End Time indicates when this syndication stops syndicating segments to audiences in the platform that you select.
   • The Execution Schedule determines how often this syndication runs. Select One time, Daily, Weekly, Custom, or Continuously.
     For a recurring schedule, the syndication runs at the same time each day.

   

2. Click Done and then click Save.

Launch the syndication

Click Launch to activate the syndication. Based on the schedule set for the syndication, the segment of users will be computed and the user data will be exported to the selected platform.

Monitoring

You can view the following information for a syndication:

• The number of users in the segment.
• The total number of users that were pushed to the selected platform (the total number includes all the users added to the paid media platform including the users that get removed from the destination platform at some point).
• The total number of audience matches (only Google Ads).

Consider the following points about the audience statistics:

1. The size of audiences on paid media platforms are reported based on their policy and might not be in real time.
2. Stats are updated in real time and reflect the active state. Refresh the page to view the latest stats.
3. Stats are stored per day, as per hour stats would not be accurate due to third party delays in adding users to audiences.
4. Blueshift cannot delete a customer from an audience in a platform integrated through LiveRamp partnership. For example, if a customer falls out of the segment that is syndicated to LinkedIn (which integrated via LiveRamp), a new audience is created in LinkedIn using the updated segment. The audience name for removed users looks like <audience name>_suppression. You must tweak your LinkedIn campaign to use both the audiences and exclude the customers who are no longer a member of the segment. To do that, you can set a condition in your LinkedIn campaign to use both audiences and ensure that it excludes customers who are members of the suppression audience. 

Stats

Blueshift provides stats on a syndication that it ran. For more information, see Syndication stats.