Use an audience in a journey segment-trigger-activity
Add a Read Audience activity about-segment-trigger-actvitiy
Use the Read Audience activity to make all individuals of a audience enter the journey. Entrance into a journey can be executed either once, or on a regular basis.
Let’s take as an example the “Luma app opening and checkout” audience created in the Build audiences use case. With the Read Audience activity, you can make all individuals belonging to this audience enter a journey and make them flow into individualized journeys that will leverage all journey functionalities: conditions, timers, events, actions.
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Guardrails and best practices must-read
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For journeys using a Read Audience activity, there is a maximum number of journeys that can start at the exact same time. Retries will be performed by the system but avoid having more than five journeys (with Read Audience, scheduled or starting “as soon as possible”) starting at the exact same time. Best practice is to spread them over time, for example 5 to 10 minutes apart.
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Experience event field groups can not be used in journeys starting with a Read audience activity, an Audience qualification activity, or a business event activity.
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As a best practice, we recommend you only use batch audiences in a Read audience activity. This will provide reliable and consistent count for the audiences used in a journey. Read audience is designed for batch use cases. If your use case needs real time data please use Audience qualification activity.
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Audiences imported from a CSV file or resulting from composition workflows can be selected in the Read Audience activity. These audiences are not available in the Audience Qualification activity.
Guardrails related to the Read Audience activity are listed in this page.
Configure the activity configuring-segment-trigger-activity
The steps to configure the Read Audience activity are as follows:
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Unfold the Orchestration category and drop a Read Audience activity into your canvas.
The activity must be positioned as the first step of a journey.
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Add a Label to the activity (optional).
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In the Audience field, choose ۶Ƶ Experience Platform audience that will enter the journey, then click Save. You can select any ۶Ƶ Experience Platform audience generated using segment definitions.
note note NOTE In addition, you can also target ۶Ƶ Experience Platform audiences created using audience compositions or uploaded from a CSV file. Note that you can customize the columns displayed in the list and sort them.
Once the audience is added, the Copy button allows you to copy its name and ID:
{"name":"Luma app opening and checkout","id":"8597c5dc-70e3-4b05-8fb9-7e938f5c07a3"}
note note NOTE Only the individuals with the Realized and Existing audience participation statuses will enter the journey. For more on how to evaluate an audience, refer to the Segmentation Service documentation. -
In the Namespace field, choose the namespace to use in order to identify the individuals. By default, the field is pre-filled with the last used namespace. Learn more about namespaces.
note note NOTE Individuals belonging to an audience that does not have the selected identity (namespace) among their different identities cannot enter the journey. You can only select a people-based identity namespace. If you have defined a namespace for a lookup table (for example: ProductID namespace for a Product lookup), it will not be available in the Namespace dropdown list. -
Set the Reading rate. This is the maximum number of profiles that can enter the journey per second. This rate applies only to this activity and no others in the journey. If you want to define a throttling rate on custom actions, for example, you need to use the throttling API. Refer to this page.
This value is stored in the journey version payload. The default value is 5,000 profiles per second. You can modify this value from 500 to 20,000 profiles per second.
note note NOTE The overall reading rate per sandbox is set to 20,000 profiles per second. Therefore, the reading rate of all the read audiences that run simultaneously in the same sandbox add up to at most 20,000 profiles per second. You cannot modify this cap. -
The Read Audience activity allows you to specify the time at which the audience will enter the journey. To do this, click the Edit journey schedule link to access the journey’s properties, then configure the Scheduler type field.
By default, audiences enter the journey As soon as possible. If you want to make the audience enter the journey on a specific date/time or on a recurring basis, select the desired value from the list.
note note NOTE Note that the Schedule section is only available when a Read Audience activity has been dropped in the canvas. 
Incremental read option: when a journey with a recurring Read audience executes for the first time, all the profiles in the audience enter the journey. This option allows you to target, after the first occurence, only the individuals who entered the audience since the last execution of the journey.
code language-none <div class="extension note"> <div>NOTE</div> <div> <p>If you are targeting a <a href="/docs/journey-optimizer/using/audiences-profiles-identities/audiences/about-audiences.html?lang=en#segments-in-journey-optimizer">custom upload audience</a> in your journey, profiles are only retrieved on the first recurrence if this option is enabled in a recurring journey, as these audiences are fixed.</p> </div> </div>Force reentrance on recurrence: this option allows you to make all profiles still present in the journey automatically exit it on the next execution. For example, if you have a 2 days wait in a daily recurrent journey, by activating this option, profiles will always be moved on the next journey execution (so the day after), whether they are in the next run audience or not. If the lifespan of your profiles in this journey may be longer than the recurrence frequency, do not activate this option to make sure that profiles can finish their journey.
Test and publish the journey testing-publishing
The Read Audience activity allows you to test the journey on a unitary profile.
To do this, activate the test mode.
Configure and run the test mode as usual. Learn how to test a journey.
Once the test is running, the Show logs button allows you to see the test results. For more on this, refer to this section
Once the tests are successful, you can publish your journey (see Publishing the journey). Individuals belonging to the audience will enter the journey on the date/time specified in the journey’s properties Scheduler section.
Audience targeting in audience-based journeys
Audience-based journeys always start with a Read Audience activity to retrieve individuals belonging to an ۶Ƶ Experience Platform audience.
The audience belonging to the audience is retrieved once or on a regular basis.
After entering the journey, you can create audience orchestration use cases, making individuals from the initial audience flow into different branches of the journey.
Segmentation
You can use conditions to perform segmentation using the Condition activity. For example, you can make VIP persons take a particular path and non-VIP flow in another path.
The segmentation can be based on:
- data source data
- the context of events part of the journey data, for example: did a person click on the message received an hour ago?
- a date, for example: are we in June when a person go through the journey?
- a time, for example: is it morning in the person’s timezone?
- an algorithm splitting the audience flowing in the journey based on a percentage, for example: 90% - 10% to exclude a control group
Exclusion
The same Condition activity used for segmentation (see above) also allows you to exclude part of the population. For example, you can exclude VIP persons by making them flow into a branch with an end step right after.
This exclusion could happen right after audience retrieval, for population counting purposes or along a multistep journey.
Union
Journeys allow you to create N branches and join them together after a segmentation.
As a result, you can make two audiences return to a common experience.
For example, after following a different experience during ten days in a journey, VIP and non-VIP customers can return to the same path.
After a union, you can split the audience again by performing a segmentation or an exclusion.
Retries read-audience-retry
Retries are applied by default on audience-triggered journeys (starting with a Read Audience or a Business Event) while retrieving the export job. If an error occurs during the export job creation, retries will be made every 10mn, for 1 hour max. After that, we will consider it as a failure. Those types of journeys can therefore be executed up to 1 hour after the scheduled time.
Unsuccessful Read Audience triggers are captured and displayed in the Alerts. The Read Audience alert warns you if a Read Audience activity has not processed any profile 10 mins after scheduled time of execution. This failure can be caused by technical issues, or because the audience is empty. If this failure is caused by technical issues, be aware that retries can still happen, depending of the type of issue (eg: if the export job creation has failed, we will retry every 10mn for 1h max). Learn more
How-to video video
Understand the applicable use cases for a journey that is triggered by the read audience activity. Learn how to build batch-based journeys and which best practices to apply.