Taxonomies
Taxonomies are a way to structure the representation of your segment data within Audience Builder.
When you upload data into our system, datasets that contain tables of segments are ingested. After ingestion, a taxonomy organizes the segments into usable objects in the UI. Taxonomies make your segment data more discoverable to your users, who will want to use that data to build new segments for campaigns and perform analysis.
You can manage the taxonomies in your account on the Taxonomies page.
The taxonomy that you set to "active" becomes the taxonomy that provides the data in the My Data folder on the Audiences page and that you can use during audience building (from the Audience Builder page). See Make a Taxonomy the Active Taxonomy.
Your LiveRamp account manager will work with you to create your initial taxonomy. If you add new datasets after Implementation, follow the instructions in "Add a New Dataset to the Active Taxonomy."
Note
Fields with large numbers of distinct values: We can ingest any segment data fields with 250 or fewer specific values. We refer to these types of fields as "enumerated fields," because we're able to enumerate them for you in the UI, such as in the taxonomy tree for that dataset.
Fields that have more than 250 distinct values (such as "time" or "price" fields that have a very large number of values) cannot currently be fully ingested and displayed in the UI. We refer to these types of fields as "raw fields."
Once taxonomies have been created, access to a taxonomy can be granted to a partner when you want that partner to be able to use the underlying data in that taxonomy.
We recommend looking through your segment data to get an understanding of what segments you have. Try to find natural relationships in your segment data.
For example, you might have many clothes-related segments. It might make sense to group those segments under a "Clothes" folder and use subfolders to group the types of clothing you might have (such as "Women's clothes"). That way someone browsing your taxonomy will quickly know you have data on clothing and other categories (such as "electronics") without having to scroll through hundreds of clothing articles before reaching the electronics segments.
Someone searching for clothing data can also search for the term "Clothes" (as you have given a folder that name) and see all your clothing segments.
We recommend staying under 6 folder levels for your taxonomies to maximize searchability and discoverability while not requiring an overwhelming number of clicks to get to the lowest level. We recommend leaving the "Level1_Desc" folder as the data type (such as the "My Data" or "Analytics Environment Data" folders).
Here’s an example taxonomy for an automotive dataset:
Level1_Desc | Level2_Desc | Level3_Desc | Level4_Desc | Level5_Desc |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | American | Dodge |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | American | Chrysler |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | Japanese | Toyota |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | Japanese | Honda |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | Japanese | Nissan |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | German | Audi |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | German | BMW |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | German | Mercedes |
My Data | Automotive | Car Type | German | Volkswagen |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | On the market | High |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | On the market | Medium |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | On the market | Low |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | One Car | High |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | One Car | Medium |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | One Car | Low |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | Two or more Cars | High |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | Two or more Cars | Medium |
My Data | Automotive | Car Ownership | Two or more Cars | Low |
Here's what the data for this taxonomy would look like in the My Data folder on the Audience Builder page, with the "On the market" segment expanded:
