Audience Segmentation is a marketing strategy based on identifying subgroups within the target audience in order to deliver more tailored messaging for stronger connections. The subgroups can be based on demographics such as geographic location, gender identity, age, ethnicity, income, or level of formal education. In this article, we discuss how to perform audience segmentation based on data extracted from various sources.

This article was originally published in Census.


To all my fellow marketers out there – tell me if this looks familiar to you:

The old way – what a nightmare. No more of these ad audience CSVs!

At my previous job, I had multiple folders jammed full of CSVs with different versions of our ad audiences, and a daily calendar reminder to “Do Audience Uploads.”

What if I told you…you could move them all to the recycle bin for good?

Now you can. Introducing Census Segments!

What is Census Segments?

A single place to build audience segments on top of your data warehouse, and sync them with all your advertising and marketing tools. No more CSV uploads or SQL required.

Census Segments - build audiences on top of your data warehouse

This means you can experiment with audiences faster, all while using trusted data from your company’s source of truth (the data warehouse). This warehouse-centric approach reflects our vision to revolutionize how companies work with data with Operational Analytics. Our mission is to deliver the best, most reliable data to every user at scale, bridging the gap between data and ops teams.

To validate our vision, this quarter we’re offering Census Segments on all plans (including free) at no cost to you. 🙌

This release of Census Segments includes:

  • UI Visual Segment Builder
  • A single place to manage segments and sync them to all downstream marketing tools
  • A library of advertising and marketing connectors
  • Approval process for data teams to verify that segments are only built on trusted data models
  • Integrations with dbt and Looker models

A new Visual Segment Builder to Create Audiences Without SQL

Instead of manual CSV uploads and complicated SQL queries, we’re offering an intuitive visual segment builder to help you build personalized audiences with all the rich data available in your warehouse. You can easily spin up segments to:

  • find lookalike audiences based on top spending customers
  • segment audiences by persona, and
  • target highly engaged users with specific campaigns.

Early users like CultureAmp and Webflow are already loving Segments 👉

“Census makes it really easy to sync audiences into our Ad platforms. I build my audiences on top of models from my data team, click go, and it just works. It does exactly what it’s supposed to.” – Ryan Luis, Sr. Manager Revenue Operations at Webflow

TL;DR: We’re going from this:

Spreadsheets all day

To this:

Census Segments example: New visual builder

The Census Advantage: A library of Marketing and Advertising Connectors

Census has a whole suite of marketing and advertising connectors, which means you can update all your audiences and segmentation lists from a single place. The benefit of managing audiences at this higher level is if you want to edit an audience down the line, you only have to make that change once and Census will update it everywhere.

We recently added a ton of new ads connectors including TikTok, Snapchat and Bing!

Census's connectors to ad destinations

Who’s Loving it?

Bleach London, a direct-to-consumer eCommerce brand, reduced cost per acquisition by 20% with better segmentation.

“That’s what I like about Census – it’s not like I have to do ‘X for Facebook and Y on email.’ With one click I can share that audience with all the platforms and we can activate all our different use cases.” — Michael Lorenzos, Head of eCommerce Growth

Read his story

Data Teams: Make Trusted Data Self-Service for Marketing

Unlike other tools designed only for marketing teams, Census has features for both data teams and ops teams.

Census Segments enables data teams to make the trusted models they’ve worked tirelessly on available for self-serve by marketing teams. To ensure this collaboration happens seamlessly we also have features to make data teams happy:

  • Approval process to only make trusted models available for segment building
  • Integrations with dbt and Looker so data teams can make their models immediately available to marketing teams.

The best part: When data changes upstream, the marketing team’s audiences will be automatically updated with ✨fresh✨ data.

Clearbit, a B2B SaaS company, syncs more than 100 fields to multiple apps to build a 360° customer view and craft hyper personalized email campaigns.

“With Census, our sales & marketing always have current data in their tools and the data team can enable growth experiments.” — Julie Beynon, Head of Analytics

Read more about using dbt & Census to empower business teams

But Wait…How is Census Segments Different From What Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) Offer?

Good question! CDPs are great marketing tools but ​​they weren’t built to be warehouse-native, which means they don’t have all the data you need and they quickly get expensive as you scale. We believe the best business outcomes are achieved when the data warehouse is the single source of truth for all business and data teams.

Want to learn more about when to use a CDP vs reverse ETL? Check out these resources:

How Do I Get Started?

Census Segments is live today! 🎉 Log in to your account or start your free trial now.

Find Segments in the sidebar of the Census app!

The Future: What’s Coming Next?

Many of our customers have requested Census Segments as a feature and this initial release is just the beginning. We have plenty of exciting improvements on the roadmap.

Keep an eye out for these upcoming features:

  • Access controls for data teams to limit settings by user
  • A richer and more powerful filter experience with our Segment Builder 2.0

Radiostud.io Staff

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