Warehouse-Managed Audiences

Manage audiences programmatically from your data warehouse.

Overview

Warehouse-Managed Audiences enable data teams to manage audiences programmatically from the warehouse, while taking full advantage of all the features that come with Audience Hub.

Getting Started

Data Models

To get started with Warehouse-Managed Audiences, you'll need to define three models in Census that map to tables in your warehouse:

1. Audiences: A list of all audiences you plan to model in your warehouse.

   1. Required columns: id and name

   2. Optional columns: description

2. People: Also known as contacts, customers, users, etc., this is a list of all people belonging to every audience you plan to model in your warehouse.

   1. Required columns: id

   2. Optional columns: other user attributes (email, phone, first/last name, IDFA, GAID, etc.)

3. Audience Memberships: A join table that tells Census which people are in each audience. Each row must include a unique pair of person and audience identifiers.

   1. Required columns: person_id and audience_id

Example Data

Audiences

id	name	description
201	VIP Customers	A list of all VIP customers.
202	All Customers (US)	Customers in the US only.
203	All Customers (EU)	Customers in the EU only.
204	Webinar Attendees	From webinar on Feb 22.

People

id	email	phone
101	[e-mail]	762-947-7170
102	[e-mail]	619-362-2778
103	[e-mail]	612-550-3366
104	[e-mail]	258-830-6056
105	[e-mail]	505-903-2266

Audience Membership (Join Table)

person_id	audience_id
101	201
101	203
102	201
103	204

Entity Definitions

This process should be done with the help of your Census representative, who can talk through any questions during setup.

Part 1: Entities

Next, create an entity for each of the three models. This will allow you to provide some additional metadata to help Census understand the shape of your data and how its related.

Audiences model -> Create an Audience type entity:

Person model -> Create a Person type entity:

Audience Membership model -> Create a Join Table type entity:

Part 2: Entity relationships

Finally, specify how these entities relate to each other by setting up relationships between them.

Connect the Person entity to the Audience Membership entity with a One-to-Many relationship:

Connect the Audience entity to the Audience Membership entity with a One-to-Many relationship:

Finalize Setup

Once your entity definitions are set up, your Census representative can finalize your configuration. You should see your imported audience segments populate in Census. You can distinguish them from audiences defined in the UI based on the "Managed" tag that appears next to the segment name.

FAQ

How do I update the membership of an audience?

Audience membership information lives in the audience membership model (join table). Any time a Warehouse-Managed Audience is queried in Census, we make a just-in-time query to this table. Thus, adding and removing rows from the audience membership model will update the membership of an audience.

How often are audiences refreshed by Census?

To determine the list of Warehouse-Managed Audiences shown in the Census UI (see below), Census runs a background job every 15 minutes which looks at your Audiences model and creates/updates/deletes the audiences accordingly.

Census determines which people are members of those audiences by querying your Audience membership table in real-time. Thus, if you preview a Warehouse-Managed Audience or run a sync based on one, Census will always be looking at the most current data in the data warehouse.

What happens if a row is added/updated/deleted from my audiences table?

Any changes to the Audiences table will be reflected in the respective audiences during the audience refresh:

• Row was added: A new audience will be created on the next refresh

• ⚠️ Row was removed: The matching audience will be marked as invalid on the next refresh. All attached syncs will be paused.

• ⚠️ Row was updated: The matching audience will be renamed in Census on the next refresh. This will not impact the name of any audiences in your downstream destinations.

What happens if I delete my Person/Audience/Join Table entity?

Any audience segments managed by the Warehouse-Managed Audience feature will no longer be considered valid. Refreshes may not work properly.

What happens if I modify my Person/Audience/Join Table relationships?

Any audiences managed by the Warehouse-Managed Audience feature will no longer be considered valid. Refreshes may not work properly.

Can I delete audiences managed by this feature?

You are not able to manually delete managed audiences through the Census UI. If you’d like to remove all of your managed audiences and disable this feature, please reach out to a Census representative.

Can I use <X> feature with Warehouse-Managed Audiences?

Any feature that is available for audiences built in the Census UI is available for Warehouse-Managed Audiences.

How can I turn off Warehouse-Managed Audiences and opt back out of this feature?

Reach out to your Census account manager, or email [e-mail].