The following best practices should help you create audiences that capture the customers you need.

When using more than one behavior group within the customer behavior filter, make sure you add your behaviors with the widest reach, then getting more granular with each additional behavior. Treating the customer behaviors setup like a funnel will ensure you aren't leaving a customer segment out.

You can do this by adding all your customer behavior criteria that use the did condition first before adding customer behavior that uses did not.

For example, you could create an audience who did add a product to their cart between one to two hours ago and then did not remove the product from their cart in the last two hours.

When creating audiences for abandoned cart, product, and search campaigns, add a staggered qualification window to capture more behavioral events and take advantage of additional retries.

For example, since cart abandonment is the highest priority event, you could add a qualification window of three hours. As the second highest priority event, product abandonment would use a qualification window of four hours, and lastly search abandonment would use a qualification window of five hours.

Some customers may not qualify for a campaign because of the channel frequency cap.

To include more customers, you can duplicate your audience and add a did not receive email customer behavior and select one or more campaigns.

If you are defining a product-based customer behavior (ex. add product(s) to cart) by inventory size, make sure the inventory size makes sense for your business.

For example, if you are a boutique or do small, limited edition inventory updates, you may not want to limit the behavior by inventory size.

The first time that you define a customer’s product or search interaction in an AND condition within an audience sets the product foundation. Once your foundation is set, you can only remove products from your base and you can’t add more, unless you add OR conditions.

These foundations are called either product-carrying or search-carrying, depending on whether they use product actions (add to cart, viewed product, etc.), or searches for products, respectively.

Both foundations must be the first one of their kind in the Customer Behaviors list,must use the positive did condition (such as did view product instead of did not view product).

You can add additional product groups as long as they reference your foundation (such as using above products instead of any products), and use a positive conditional (like did add products to cart instead of did not add products to cart).

For example, let's say you want to create an audience that added products to cart in the last three hours, added those products to a wishlist, viewed any products four to five hours ago, and did not make a purchase in the last 30 days. The following list breaks out the groups and how they work together:

If you've created your audience using customer attributes or behaviors, you can validate that the audience is pulling in the correct customers:

As you build your audience, you may notice that something doesn't look quite right. Here are a few common issues and how to troubleshoot them.

Note: When troubleshooting, you can click Preview Audience at any time to check the size of your audience. This will not save the audience, so you can use this as much as needed for troubleshooting assistance.

Audiences dynamically update when used in a campaign, so a cart abandonment audience may be larger or smaller than it was last week. Because an audience can't be saved without first being previewed, the Last Edited column on the Audiences page is a good indication of how recently the audience size was calculated.

In the audience, click Preview Audience to get a new audience size.

If you're using an audience with a campaign, you may be seeing a discrepancy for the following reasons:

If you have multiple campaigns going out, some customers may have hit their frequency cap from another campaign. To know what your global frequency caps are, check the setup in the account-level marketing settings.

In your audience, review the conditions for each attribute and make sure that you're using the and and or conditions as you expect.

If one of your conditions looks wrong, you can edit the filter criteria, change the condition, and preview the audience.

Remove one filter, then preview your audience. If the audience number still doesn't match what you expect, remove a second filter and preview your audience.

Continue removing filters until you find the one that's causing the discrepancy.

If you are using new customer attributes that were imported less than 24 hours ago, the file may not have completed uploading. Wait 24 hours after the initial import before previewing your audience.

For more information, see data imports review.

If previewing the audience is taking a long time to run or errors out, check your lookback window and make sure it's six months or less.