Determining the Number of Audiences to Create
An audience is a way to group your users within LiveRamp. In many cases, you only need to have one audience. However, in some situations you might need, or want, to create more than one audience.
Caution
In most cases, you should have a new audience created by our support team by creating a case in the LiveRamp Community portal. This way they can ensure that the file columns are mapped appropriately, the audience key is correct, the appropriate precision level is selected, and the desired refresh type is enabled. In the less common instance where you're creating a second audience where the files are going to all use the same settings as the current one (column mapping, audience key, precision level, refresh types, etc.), you can create the new audience yourself if you wish.
Only admin users can create new audiences. To see which users on your account are admin users, select the "Users" tab from the Company Settings page. LiveRamp recommends that only one person per company should be responsible for managing users in Connect. See "Access Levels and Restrictions for Connect Users" for more information.
Benefits of Using a Single Audience
Using only one audience, if that's possible for your situation, has several benefits:
Makes it easier to manage your data in Connect.
Simplifies consolidation of records and billing: LiveRamp can only de-duplicate records within a particular audience. LiveRamp cannot de-duplicate records across multiple audiences. Using multiple audiences might result in being billed for the same record more than once (depending on your contract terms).
Avoids having to upload a particular file multiple times if the same data needs to be used in different audiences.
Situations That Might Require Additional Audiences
In general, determine the number of audiences to use based on what makes it easiest to manage your data and based on the type of identifiers you’ll be uploading (PII identifiers vs. device identifiers).
LiveRamp also has some recommended audience limits to keep in mind that might affect the number of audiences you need.
See the sections below for more information.
Data Management Issues
If your company operates multiple brands, you might choose to use one audience per brand so that you can more easily manage your data. This ensures that LiveRamp tracks your unique records individually per brand, so that data from different brands doesn't conflict.
Different Audience Keys
Another reason you might need to create an additional audience is that you want to upload a file that contains a different type of identifier as the audience key than the file you used initially for a given audience. Because LiveRamp creates a data mapping for each audience based on the original file uploaded, including which field to use as an audience key for the deduplication of records, all subsequent files uploaded for that audience need to use the same audience key and types of identifiers.
For example, maybe you initially uploaded some files with only email addresses as the identifiers, but now you have new files with only name and postal addresses (NAP) as the identifiers. You'd need to create a new audience for the files keyed off of NAP.
Note
This situation would not require multiple audiences if all your files had both email address and name and postal addresses fields.
Different Identifier Types
If you initially uploaded a file containing PII identifiers, you’d need to create an additional audience to use to upload data containing device identifiers.
Exceeding Recommended Audience Limits
You might have too many records or segment data fields to stay within our recommended audience limits, and so you might need to create additional audiences to account for those limits.