Implementation Guidance implementation-guidance

People-Based Destinations offers multiple implementation strategies, depending on how your customer data is structured. This article provides an overview of the implementation steps that you need to follow for People-Based Destinations, depending on your scenario.

Overview overview

The configuration of People-Based Destinations takes you through multiple sections of Audience Manager and requires different settings and data onboarding methods, depending on what kind of customer data you already have in Audience Manager, and what kind of audience targeting you want to perform.

There are six implementation aspects that you need to clarify before using People-Based Destinations. This article will help you understand what your current configuration is, so that you can correctly follow the implementation steps for your scenario.

1. Defining Your Use Case defining-your-use-case

Before you begin implementing People-Based Destinations, you need to clearly define the use case that you will be using this feature for. You can use People-Based Destinations to target audiences in two ways, based on audience activity:

A) Audience targeting based on your combined online and offline user activity. In this scenario, you want to combine existing audience data from Audience Manager with data from your internal CRM system, and send the resulting audience segments to People-Based Destinations. Here’s an example that illustrates this scenario:

Your company, an airline, has different customer tiers (Bronze, Silver, and Gold), and you want to provide each of the tiers with personalized offers via social platforms. You use Audience Manager to analyze customer activity on your website. However, not all customers use the airline’s mobile app, and some of them have not logged in to the company’s website. Your customer data is mostly limited to membership IDs and email addresses.

To target them across social media and similar people-based channels, you can bring your hashed email addresses into Audience Manager and combine them with your existing online activity traits, to build new audience segments. Next, you can use those segments to target your audience through People-Based Destinations.

B) Audience targeting based exclusively on your offline user activity. In this scenario, your CRM system contains your customer email addresses and other customer attributes, but customers have not interacted with your website at all, so you don’t have any customer activity in Audience Manager. Here’s an example that illustrates this scenario:

Your company, a telecom services provider, keeps customer data like email addresses and purchased telecom plans in an internal CRM. You want to target existing customers in social platforms to offer them upgrade packages based on their existing subscriptions. To do this, you can ingest your hashed customer email addresses into Audience Manager, and create segments based on the existing customer subscriptions. Then, you can send these segments to People-Based Destinations to target your customers with personalized offers.

2. Define the Type of Targeted Email Addresses define-target-email

The second step in defining your implementation strategy is deciding what type of customer email addresses you want to target.

A) Audience targeting based on your authenticated email addresses. In this scenario, your users have multiple accounts associated with multiple email addresses, and you want to target them with personalized offers, based only on the email address that they authenticate on your website, in real time.

B) Audience targeting based on all of your associated email addresses. In this scenario, your users have multiple accounts associated with multiple email addresses, and you want to target them across all of their associated email addresses, regardless of authenticated activity.

3. Identify the Type of Customer IDs (CRM IDs) That You Have identify-customer-id

Targeting audiences in People-Based Destinations requires you to send SHA256 hashed versions of your customer email addresses. Depending on your existing Audience Manager configuration, you may find yourself in one of the following two scenarios:

A) Your Audience Manager customer IDs (DPUUIDs) are already lowercase, hashed email addresses. In this scenario, you can use these existing IDs to target your audiences in People-Based Destinations.

B) Your Audience Manager customer IDs (DPUUIDs) are not lowercase, hashed email addresses. In this scenario, your existing customer IDs cannot be sent to People-Based Destinations. To use People-Based Destinations, you need to perform an ID synchronization between your existing customer IDs and lowercase, hashed versions of your customer email addresses. You do this either through file-based ID synchronization or by using declared IDs.

4. Trait Qualification trait-qualification

To accurately target your audience in People-Based Destinations, your users need to qualify for either rule-based or onboarded traits, depending on the type of audience targeting that you want to perform.

A) Qualify your customer IDs and device IDs in real time for rule-based traits. This option applies to use case A from 1. Defining Your Use Case. If your plan is to target audiences based on online and offline activity, then you most likely are already qualifying your audience for rule-based traits.

B) Onboard traits against your customer IDs via inbound data files. This option applies to use case B from 1. Defining Your Use Case. When targeting your audience based on purely offline activity, you need to qualify customer IDs for onboarded traits through inbound data files.

5. Create or Label Data Sources and Onboard Hashed Email Addresses create-label-data-sources

Depending on the type of customer IDs that you have in Audience Manager (see 3. Identify the Type of Customer IDs (CRM IDs) That You Have, you will find yourself in one of the following scenarios:

A) Label an existing data source. This option applies to the scenario where your Audience Manager customer IDs (DPUUIDs) are already lowercase, hashed email addresses. In this situation, what you need to do is label your data source that you store the IDs in as a PII data source. See Data Source Settings for details on the data source settings. What you need to do is make sure the Cannot be tied to personally identifiable information option is unchecked.

B) Create a new data source. This option applies to the scenario where your Audience Manager customer IDs (DPUUIDs) are not hashed email addresses. In this case, you need to create a new cross-device data source and onboard your hashed email addresses against it. You can do this in two ways:

6. Use a Profile Merge Rule for Segmentation use-profile-merge-rules

Depending on your use case (see 1. Defining Your Use Case), there are two ways to use Profile Merge Rules for segmentation.

A) Use existing Profile Merge Rules. This option applies to the first use case (audience targeting based on combined online and offline user activity). In this scenario, you have existing customer activity in Audience Manager and you have already defined at least one Profile Merge Rule that you have used in segmentation. In this case, you don’t need to create any new Profile Merge Rules.

B) Create a new, All Cross-Device Profiles Merge Rule. This option applies to the second use case (audience targeting based exclusively on offline user activity). In this scenario you are bringing your offline customer data from your CRM into Audience Manager, and want to create segments from that data. To do this, People-Based Destinations introduces a new, fourth Profile Merge Rule, called All Cross-Device Profiles. This is the rule that you need to use when segmenting purely offline data.