Personas Overview

Personas is a powerful personalization platform that enables you to create unified customer profiles in Segment, to build and enrich audiences, and to activate audiences across marketing tools.

What can you do with Personas?

Create unified customer profiles

Personas uses Segment Identity Resolution to take event data from across devices and channels, and intelligently merge it into complete user- or account-level profiles. This gives your organization a single view of your customer base. See the Identity Resolution documentation to learn more.

Enrich profiles with new traits

Add detail to user profiles with new traits, and use them to power personalized marketing campaigns. You can add new traits to your user or account profiles in Segment using:

• Computed Traits: Use the Personas drag-and-drop interface to build per-user (B2C) or per-account (B2B) metrics on user profiles (for example, “lifetime value” or “lead score”).
• SQL Traits: Run custom queries on your data warehouse using the Personas SQL editor, and import the results into Segment. This allows you to pull rich user data that you aren’t capturing using your Segment implementation, back into Segment.

Build Audiences

Create a list of users or accounts that match specific criteria, for example “inactive accounts” (paying accounts who haven’t logged in in 60 days), and push that to your marketing and analytics tools. Learn more about Personas audiences.

Sync audiences to marketing tools

Once you create your Computed Traits and Audiences, Personas sends them to your Segment Destinations in just a few clicks. You can use these to personalize messages across channels, optimize ad spend, and improve targeting. You can also use the Profile API to build in-app and onsite personalization. Learn more about using Personas data and the Profile API.

Personas core components

Before you start setting up Personas, here are some features and terms that we’ll use in this documentation. The main parts of Personas are your Personas space(s), Audiences, and the Profile Explorer, and Traits (Computed, SQL, and Custom).

Personas Spaces

A space is a separate Personas environment. There are two main reasons you might use spaces:

• To separate your development and production environments (highly recommended)
• To separate environments for distinct teams or geographical regions.

Audiences

An Audience is a list of either users (B2C), or accounts (B2B), who match a specific criteria. An example of a basic Audience that Segment’s Marketing team might build is an “active sign ups” audience for an email marketing campaign. This Audience is contains all users who signed up in the last seven days, and who also added a source within 7 days of signing up. The example below shows how you could define this audience in the Audience Builder.

Profile Explorer and Traits

The profile explorer is the single view of your customer in Personas. Traits are user or account attributes that you can see in the Profile Explorer.

• The Profile Explorer contains all of the data that you have on a user - from their event history to their traits and identifiers.
• Computed Traits are per-user or per-account traits that you create or “compute” in Personas using a drag-and-drop interface. When you build a Computed Trait, Personas adds it to relevant user profiles. Personas recomputes these traits once an hour to make they are always accurate. See the Computed traits documentation for more detailed information.
• SQL Traits are per-user or per-account traits that you create by running queries against your data warehouse, which can include data not captured using your Segment implementation. Segment imports the results into Personas, and appends these traits to the user profile. Personas recomputes these traits every 12 hours to make sure they are always accurate. See the SQL trait documentation for more detailed information.
• Custom Traits are user or account properties collected from all the events you send to Personas. For example, you can add any properties that you send as a part of your track calls or identify calls (email, first_name, last_name) as custom traits. You can then view them in the profile explorer, and use them in your audiences, computed traits and SQL traits.