How to activate data to Salesforce Audience Studio

You can activate your first-party data from InfoSum to Salesforce Audience Studio.

To activate your first-party data from InfoSum to Salesforce Audience Studio, you need to implement Saleforce’s self-service data ingestion process. Audience Studio provides an S3 bucket that you can set up as your activation destination in InfoSum. You can then directly send the file with your activation segment and make it available in Salesforce. Let’s see how.

Set up your cloud location in Salesforce

Create an S3 bucket

If you already have this set up, please skip this step.

Salesforce Audience Studio users with Admin permissions can generate S3 credentials from within the Audience Studio UI. The admin will create a bucket in Krux’s Amazon S3 account and upload the data files to S3.

To generate the credentials (called ‘Key’ in Salesforce Audience Studio):

Navigate to My Account.
Under Data Access Security, click on Generate Key.
Save information (S3 bucket, Access Key, and Secret Key) for future reference.

You can find more information on how to generate S3 credentials here.

Once you created S3 credentials, the bucket is ready for the file import. Keep the credentials on hand as you’ll need them later in the process.

Create a new data connector to match your activation segment

You’ll need a data connector to make the data available for building the audience in the Data Management Platform (DMP).

Under the Manage menu, select Data Capture Source and then under Offline files source click on Create new connector:

Enter a name for your connector in the top left of the screen.
Click Add Description to enter details about the connector being created
Select the data type User Attributes Data.
Select the right identifier used according to the key selected building the segment or running the activation query on InfoSum Platform (KUID, MAID, Hashed email, Other ID).
Select the Data Refresh Handling setting to specify how new files should be processed. There are two options for the data refresh setting:
- Append: Files will be imported incrementally (each new file will be added to existing imported files).
This option requires a lookback window to be specified to define how far back the system should look for files (when the users expire). For example, if you enter a lookback window of 30 days, the system will only look for the last 30 days of files, no further.
- Overwrite: Each new file will be a full refresh of the data so all users will be updated. (Note: This setting requires a look back of 0 days.)

We recommend you choose the Append setting as you will have all the files ingested available on the platform in the last number of days according to what you define as lookback window.
Enter the file location (S3 Bucket). The file location must be within your provisioned S3 bucket.
Compression file type: select none.
File format: select CSV format. You don't need to specify the delimiter because you will choose the default delimiter in InfoSum.
Enter one row for each column in the imported file: here you are asked to enter the attribute name as it should display in the Salesforce Segment Builder and its attribute type (for example, “identifier”, “user attribute”, or “ignore” to disregard the field).

Files from InfoSum have two columns: the identifier and a segment name. So you need to fill two rows.
The first row is the name of the matching key. Select Identifier from the menu.
In the second row, enter the name of the second column of the InfoSum file, for example, InfoSumAudience. Remember this is the name of the attribute you will see in the Segment Builder GUI as attributes to select for building the segment. Then select User attributes from the near menu.
Click on the Create Connector button.

Once the new connector is created, this will be visible under Manage > Data capture source. Clicking into the new offline data connector allows for a more detailed view of the connection process and information about the record involved (valid record, matched record)

For more information, click here.

Data activation in InfoSum

Create an activation Bunker

To export your audience segment out of InfoSum you’ll need to have an activation Bunker.
If you don’t have one yet, you’ll need to set this up first. See creating a dataset for details.

When you are setting up your activation Bunker, please make sure that you select, as an output column, one of the IDs that Audience Studio can currently ingest:

KUID (Salesforce cookie ID)
MAID
Hashed email*
First Party ID (needs a user matching process to make data activable into the DMP. You can find more information about this process on the User Matching section of the Salesforce support guide)

*Please reach out to your InfoSum contact if you want to activate hashed emails through Salesforce Audience Studio.

There are two options for activation:

You build the audience segment and use your activation Bunker, or
You give permission to a partner to build a segment and use your activation Bunker

Option one: you build the audience segment and use your activation Bunker

Step 1: Create your activation segment

Using Segment Builder

For more information on how to create a segment see using Segment Builder.

Once the segment is created select New Activation from the menu on the top right corner. Choose the dataset you want to use for activation, the output column you want to export and add a Campaign ID to identify the campaign.

Check the Add a column of string values to your output data option to easily build the CSV file as is requested by the Audience Studio ingestion process.

Add a Column Name, and a Column Value. The value is the copy in the second column of the file exported and will create the attribute associated with the user inside Audience Studio.

For this reason, we suggest using the following format “attribute:value1”, for example, Infos
SumAudience:HighSpenders. Select Caret(^) as the Column Delimiter and click Submit.

Using the Query Tool

For more information on how activation queries work, see activation query.

To write an activation query, go to the Query Tool and select Activation as your query type. Under the Query Text box you can see the Settings, tick the Add a column of string values to your output data option to easily build the CSV file as is requested by the Audience Studio ingestion process.

Follow the same naming convention as above, select Caret(^) as the Column Delimiter, and click on Create Campaign.

How Audience Studio will read this file

Audience Studio implements a “schema-on-read” model and so doesn’t have a fixed schema for its underlying User Data model.

Columns from the client’s data schema are treated as attributes and can be created on the fly. The Audience Studio ETL platform automatically identifies new attributes (or columns) and attribute values in the input data and loads them into Audience Studio.

Following the previous rules, both for segment or activation query option, allows you to build a CSV file where each line should be in the following format:

User123^InfoSumAudience:HighSpender

Audience Studio identifies the new attribute = InfoSumAudience and its value = High Spender for the user with the identifier = User123.

Step 2: Connect your Salesforce S3 bucket to your activation Bunker

After running the activation query or building the segment, you need to connect the results with the Audience Studio S3 bucket.

Go to the Activation tab under Activate and select the campaign you created for the data activation. At the bottom of the page, you will see a box containing three menu tabs - Details, Export Configuration and Export Configuration. Switch to Export Configuration and use the slider to enable Amazon S3 with access key. Please reach out to support@infosum.com if you cannot see this connector.

Fill out the form with details of the Audience Studio S3 that you generated when you set up your cloud location in Salesforce. You can find more information on how to fill out the form here. Please ensure all fields are filled out correctly, especially the Destination Filename. The filename cannot have spaces or special characters ( - or _ can be used) and must be in the following format:

yyy_userattributes_{date}.csv

Where:

yyy is the organization name and

{date} is in the format yyyymmdd

For example: Publishername_userattributes_20210416.csv

Option two: you give permission to a partner to build a segment and use your activation Bunker

If you want to allow another partner to reference your dataset and to use your activation Bunker for activating data, you need to create an Activation permission. When you create permissions, you define how another party can use your dataset. You can see here how InfoSum Permissions work.

Step 1. Create an activation permission

First of all, you need to create an activation permission for your activation Bunker that allows your partner to reference your dataset. You can see how to create activation permissions here.

Step 2. Share the activation dataset name with the partner

The partner will need to know the name of the activation dataset, this will be required to insert both if they build a segment to activate or if they run an activation query.

Step 3. Share the S3 credentials with the partner

Please follow your organization's process to share information with a third party.

Step 4. The partner creates the activation segment and pushes it to the S3 location

As described in option one above.

Verify that Salesforce is ingesting data correctly

Go to Manage > Data capture source.

Click into the new offline data connector and you can see a more detailed view of the connection process and information about the record involved (valid record, matched record).

The second verification step you can do is searching for the attributes InfoSumAudience inside the list of first-party attributes available in the menu of the Segment Builder UI.

If you pass the verification stages, your data is available for building DMP audiences.

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