You can use Acoustic Exchange to exchange audience data between software products that are registered as endpoints in your Acoustic Exchange account.

Acoustic Exchange defines an audience as a collection of attributes and IDs that identify and describe individuals and their behavior in various channels. Through audience sharing, you can use a data segmentation product to define a target audience and then make the results available in another product where you can act upon the data.

In Acoustic Exchange, an audience source is a product that provide audience data while audience destinations receive audience data. To share audience data between the source and the destination, you must register each product as an endpoint in your Acoustic Exchange account.

Note: a single endpoint cannot be both an audience source and destination.

Only products that have successfully integrated with Acoustic Exchange as an Acoustic Exchange partner are available for registration as an endpoint.

Audience sharing options

Acoustic Exchange provides you with various options that allow you to specify how, where, and when audience data from the source audience is made available in the destination audience.

When you share an audience through Acoustic Exchange, you select various identifiers and attributes available in the source audience and map them to corresponding fields in the destination.

During audience sharing, you make choices for the following audience sharing characteristics:

Marketing database

Acoustic Exchange requires that products integrated with Acoustic Exchange provide a description of the types of audience data they intend to share. This description is your marketing database. The marketing database properties describe identifiers and attributes that audience source or destination endpoint supports.

Identifiers

Acoustic Exchange requires that audience source and destination endpoints specify at least one attribute that uniquely identifies each member of the audience. Acoustic Exchange refers to this type of data as an identifier. An email address is an example of a common identifier because it is unique to a specific person.

Different endpoints can use different names for the same identifier. To help ensure that every individual is correctly identified when you share an audience, you can map one or more identifiers in the source audience to an identifier of the same type that is available in the destination endpoint.

For example, if the source database stores email addresses in a field that is named Email and the destination stores the address as CustEmail, you can map Email to CustEmail to ensure that the identifier is correctly added to the destination.

You can also add identity records for all members of the source audience to the Acoustic Exchange Identity Store as a way to rapidly make identity information available to Acoustic Exchange for identity matching. You can perform the upload at the same time as you share the audience with a destination, or perform the identifier upload separately.

Attributes

Audience data often contains various attributes that describe specific characteristics of the members of the audience. Different endpoints can use different names for the same data.

To help ensure sharing between the source and destination audiences, you can map an attribute in the source audience to one or more attributes that are available in the destination endpoint. For example, the source database might store values for family names in fields called Last_name and Addr_Lname. The destination might store values for all family names in a field called Surname. In this example, to ensure attribute matches, you would map Last_name and Addr_Lname to Surname.

Scheduling

You can schedule audience sharing to happen immediately or at a later date. You can also schedule audience sharing to happen on a recurring basis, according to a frequency that you specify.

For example, sharing and audience that provides email addresses immediately before a scheduled email campaign can help ensure that you have up to date address list. Scheduling the audience share in advance is one less thing to worry about during the last minute preparations.

Scheduling audience sharing on a recurring basis accommodates market activity that happens continuously. For example, you can schedule weekly sharing of audiences that capture email opt-out requests.

Note: When you specify Time, GMT is used.

Destination options

In some cases, the destination endpoint for sharing an audience might require you to take action in the endpoint to ensure that the shared audience data is stored properly. Depending on how the audience destination endpoint allows records to be added to its data store, you might be able to use options available in Acoustic Exchange to specify how the source audience records are added to the destination database.

Depending on the destination’s database security permissions, in addition to adding records to the database, you might also be able to remove or replace existing records.

Set up audience sharing schedules

Monitor and manage scheduled audience sharing in the Scheduled view of the Audiences tab.

In the Audiences tab, the Scheduled view lists all of the scheduled audience shares that are defined for your account.

• To view a specific scheduled share, review the list in the Audience or Destination column. Click a column heading to sort the column. To search the list, enter a search term in the Search field.
• To update an audience schedule, find the scheduled audience the Audience or Destination column. Use either of the following options to open a screen where you can update the schedule.
  • Click Click to modify.
  • Select Modify Schedule.
• To delete an audience schedule select Remove.

Monitor audience sharing status

When you share an audience, you can monitor the progress of the data exchange from the Audiences tab.

The Audiences tab presents status information in several different views.

• Recent. This view contains information about audiences that were shared within the past 72 hours. The Status column displays 1 of 5 possible conditions to describe the current state of the audience sharing process.
• Historical. This view contains information about audiences that were shared more than 72 hours previous. Like the Recent view, the Status column displays 1 of 5 possible conditions to describe the current state of the audience sharing process.
• Scheduled. This view lists audiences that are scheduled to be shared at some time in the future. In this view, the Status column indicates only whether the schedule is enabled or disabled.

In all views, you can click Actions to display additional information about the audience.

Procedure

In the Scheduled view, look in the Status column to determine whether a schedule is enabled or disabled. The Status column displays the status of the schedule, not the status of audience sharing. The Schedule column displays how often the audience share is scheduled to run.

In the Recent or Historical views, look in the Status column to view the current state of the audience data exchange. The audience share can be in one of the following states:

Pending The audience sharing has not started yet or encountered an error that prevents further processing.

Running The audience records are being transferred from the audience provider to Exchange and from Exchange to the audience consumer.

Complete Transfer of audience records from audience producer to audience consumer is complete.

Canceled The audience sharing was stopped before all of the records were transferred from producer endpoint to consumer endpoint. The Completed column displays the time that the transfer was stopped.

Failed The audience sharing encountered an error that prevents further processing and does not allow the system to recover from the error. Click View details for more information about what caused the failure.

View when the audience share started and finished in the Started and Completedcolumns. The amount of time that is required to complete the audience data exchange depends on the number of records that the audience contains.

Click Actions to display additional information about the audience. In the Details window, select the Status Details tab for more status information, including error messages.

Sort columns to organize status information.

On the Recent and Historical tabs, sort the Status, Started, and Completedcolumns to get a view of audience sharing across various audiences and endpoints.

Sort the Status column to view shared audiences according to their state. For example, you can sort to view all instances where audience sharing failed to complete successfully.

Sort the Started column to view previous audience sharing runs by the date and time the sharing began.

Sort the Completed column to view all of the audience shares according to the date and time that the all of the audience data was received by the destination endpoint. You can also see audience sharing that did not complete. See the Status tab in Endpoint details to see why the sharing did not finish.

View audience sharing on the dashboard

The dashboard contains a summary view of all audience sharing during a specified time period.

View all audience sharing on the dashboard

1. Click the Dashboard tab to open the dashboard.
2. Select a time period for which to view audience sharing results.
   • Last hour
   • Last 24 hours
   • Last 7 days
   • Last 30 days

View summary results in the Audiences Summary section. You can also view consolidated results for all audience sharing by selecting All for all fields in the Audiences graph.

View individual audience sharing on the dashboard

The Audiences tab lists individual instances of audience sharing separately.

The Recent view lists audiences that were shared within the past 72 hours. The Historical view lists audiences that were shared more than 72 hours ago.

To find the audience share that you want to examine, review the Audience or Destination columns.

Click a column heading to sort the column.

To make it easier to find a particular audience share, you can search the list. Enter a term in the Search field. Acoustic Exchange displays audiences and destinations that contain the search term.

In the dashboard, you can select individual instances of audience sharing to view the results of sharing an audience between a specific audience source endpoint and audience destination endpoint.

1. Open the dashboard.
2. Select a time period.
3. In the Audiences graph, select an audience destination in the Audience Destination field. The graph displays instances of audience sharing to the selected destination endpoint.

If you display Number of audiences, each vertical bar represents an audience share. Hover over a bar to view share statistics.

If you display Number of rows, each vertical bar represents the number of records that are published to, or received by, the destination endpoint.

Repeat audience sharing

When you configure a source endpoint to share audience data repeatedly, how frequently you share an audience determines how much audience data Acoustic Exchange shares with the destination endpoint.

If you schedule audience sharing to repeat daily, Acoustic Exchange includes audience data that is collected and provided by the source endpoint during the previous 1 day.

If you schedule audience sharing to repeat weekly, Acoustic Exchange includes audience data that is collected and provided by the source endpoint during the previous 7 days.

If you schedule audience sharing to repeat on a custom basis, Acoustic Exchange includes audience data that is collected and provided by the source endpoint during the 1 day before each day that the audience provider shares data through Acoustic Exchange.

For some integrations, currently Acoustic Campaign , audience sharing offers an intra-day option. With the intra-day option, you can use the same scheduling features that are used with the daily option.