Create audiences

Audiences define the group of users or accounts you want to target in your campaigns. Using the visual audience builder, marketers can filter, preview, and activate audiences without writing SQL.

Learning objectives

After reading this article, you’ll know how to:

• Create a new audience in Customer Studio
• Apply filters to define and refine audience membership
• Preview and validate audience results
• Limit and control audience size
• Analyze and reuse audiences
• Sync audiences to destinations

Overview

The audience builder lets you visually define and activate segments of users or accounts. It’s designed for marketers to build precise audiences using data from your warehouse, preview the results, and activate them directly in campaigns.

You can filter audiences based on properties, events, relationships, and traits, then preview and activate them directly in your marketing and advertising tools.

Once created, audiences can be:

• Analyzed in Insights
• Used in Journeys
• Split for experiments
• Synced to destinations

Audience types (batch vs real-time)

Hightouch supports both batch and real-time audience evaluation.

Use batch audiences when you need stable segments that update on a predictable cadence, such as lifecycle or nurture campaigns.

Use real-time audiences when you want to respond instantly to user behavior like triggering an ad, notification, or personalization within seconds of an event.

Create and refine audiences (core workflow)

Step 1: Create a new audience

1. Go to Customer Studio → Audiences.
2. Click Add Audience.
   

   

3. Select a Parent Model to segment (for example, Users, Accounts, or Devices).
   

   

4. Name your audience (for example, High-Value Customers) and add an optional description.

Step 2: Apply filters

Start from an audience template or create filters from scratch.

Combine filters with AND/OR logic

Use AND, OR, and nested groups to express complex logic.

Example:

Include users who made a purchase or added to cart, and belong to the Gold tier.

Step 3: Preview and validate your audience

After defining filters, preview your audience to confirm that your logic returns the expected members.

• Click Calculate size to estimate audience size.
• Click the member count (for example, 110 members) to preview sample records.
  

  

Limit audience size

Limit audience size to focus on your highest-value members or to run controlled experiments on an audience subset.

1. Click the Limit audience size icon.
2. Choose Top or Bottom, specify size, and select a sort column (for example, purchase_amount or last_purchase_date).
   

   

Preview with destination rules

If your workspace uses destination rules, you can select a destination to preview how the audience will sync before saving.

Step 4: Analyze your audience

Use Insights to analyze composition and overlap.

• Click Show Insights to open the panel.
  • Overlap compares shared members with another audience.
  • Breakdown displays distribution by trait, geography, or behavior.

Step 5: Save and reuse audiences

Click Save audience to finalize your setup.

Reuse audiences with templates

To create repeatable logic, apply an audience template directly in the builder.
Templates let you standardize approved audience definitions for faster setup.

Clone audiences

To duplicate an existing audience, open the overflow menu and click Clone.
You can modify filters, rename the copy, and choose which syncs to duplicate.

Step 6: Sync to destinations

After saving, activate your audience by syncing to tools such as CRMs, ESPs, or ad platforms.

Learn more in Sync audiences →

Advanced filtering and configuration

Use these optional tools to create more sophisticated or large-scale audiences.

Filter using related models

If your data includes relationships (for example, Users → Orders → Items), you can build filters across connected models. This lets you target users based on behaviors or attributes in other tables.

Example

Target users who placed an order worth more than $100 where at least one item purchased was in the “Flights” category.

Filter nested JSON data

Some columns contain nested JSON objects or arrays (type unknown JSON).
You can filter inside these structures using dot-path notation to access specific fields.

For example:

• booking.product.geo.city filters by a nested property inside an object.
• booking.0 filters by the first item in an array.

This is useful when event data or object payloads store multiple attributes within a single column.
JSON filtering is supported on parent, event, and related models.

Example JSON

{"inventory":{"on_order":50,"stock":750,"warehouse":"WHB"}, "dimensions":[9, 8, 7]}
{"inventory":{"on_order":10,"stock":120,"warehouse":"WHA"}, "dimensions":[5, 4, 3]}

If the column is on a parent model:

If the column is on an event model:

How to filter

Use dot-path notation to specify the exact field you want to filter on. Hightouch supports both object and array traversal for nested JSON fields.

By default, JSON columns are treated as type unknown with the exists operator. You can manually set the data type—string, number, or boolean—to unlock the operators that make sense for that field.

All standard operators supported in the audience builder (for example, equals, contains, greater than, exists) are available, but only if they’re compatible with the selected type.

Preview

Depending on your dataset size and how recent your events are (if filtering event data), you may use the member preview to confirm that your JSON paths and filters return the expected results.

Drag and drop values

For certain textual and numerical operators, you can upload a list of values directly into your filter using drag and drop instead of entering them manually.

This feature saves time when working with long lists, such as customer IDs, organization IDs, or email addresses, so you don’t have to copy and paste each value.

You can drag and drop .txt or .csv files containing comma-separated values (CSV) directly into the filter’s value field.

Example use case

• You have a CSV file with hundreds of organization IDs.
• Instead of entering each ID manually, drag and drop the file into the input box of a property filter.
• Hightouch automatically uploads and parses the list of values for you.

Supported operators

Operator reference

Each filter condition in the audience builder uses a set of comparison operators to determine whether records meet your criteria.

The available operators depend on the data type (text, number, Boolean, or timestamp).

Use this table to confirm which operators are available for each data type.

Textual operators

When filtering on textual data (for example, product brand, location, or email domain), you can use:

• equals
• does not equal
• contains
• does not contain
• starts with
• ends with
• exists
• does not exist

Behavior details

Numerical operators

When filtering on numerical data (for example, price, score, or lifetime value), you can use:

• equals
• does not equal
• greater than
• less than
• greater than or equal to
• less than or equal to
• exists
• does not exist

You can use the drag and drop feature with the following operators: equals and does not equal.

When using greater than, less than, greater than or equal to, or less than or equal to, you can enter:

• an absolute numerical value (for example, purchase_amount > 100), or
• a percentile (for example, “top 50th percentile of lifetime value”).

To use the percentile option, make sure the column has value suggestions turned off in the schema configuration.

Timestamp operators

When filtering on timestamps (for example, purchase date or last activity), you can use:

• equals
• before
• after
• within
• not within
• between
• anniversary
• exists
• does not exist

You can choose between rolling or calendar time periods for relative filters.

Examples:

• To find users active in the last 60 days → use “within previous 2 months” (rolling window).
• To find users active during a specific range → use “within previous 2 calendar months.”
  If today is June 3, this filters for dates between April 1 and May 31.

Configure null-value behavior

When building filters, you may encounter null data (for example, missing country values).

Admins can control how nulls behave for “not” operators in Workspace Settings.

Options:

• Treat null values like any other value (default):
  Country does not equal USA → includes Country = null
• Use special behavior for null values:
  Country does not equal USA → excludes Country = null

Experimentation and governance

Split audiences for experiments

Divide an audience into random or rule-based groups for testing.

Each profile is assigned once, based on its primary key.

Changing split percentages can reassign users—use a snapshot to preserve consistency.

How audiences stay up to date

Audiences update automatically as your source data changes so campaigns always reach the right people.

Segment by households or accounts

In some workspaces, audience data is organized around more than one entity type, such as: People, Households, or Accounts. When you enable schema labeling, the audience builder automatically reflects these relationships.

This allows you to create audiences that consider shared characteristics or behaviors across related entities, rather than limiting segmentation to individuals.

With schema labels applied, filters adjust automatically so you can build audiences using data from connected entities. For instance, you can define a People audience that includes or excludes members based on traits of their associated Household or Account.

Examples:

• Household segmentation: Include people in households that meet a shared condition (for example, at least one member identifies as female or holds an active subscription).
  

  

• Account segmentation: Include people whose associated account shows recent activity or engagement (for example, a recent purchase or contract renewal).
  

  

Example use cases

Abandoned checkout retargeting

Goal: Retarget users who started checkout but didn’t complete.

Filters

• Event: Checkout started within last 24 hours
• Event: Order completed not performed in same window
• Trait: LTV > 200
• Property: Email is not null

Sync to

• Facebook Custom Audiences
• Klaviyo List

Real-time travel personalization

Goal: Personalize offers for users who searched flights or hotels in the last 24 hours.

Filters

• Event: search where category = flight OR hotel
• Event: search_time performed within 24 hours
• Trait: loyalty_status = Gold

Enable real-time evaluation, split 80/20 for testing, and sync to ad platforms.
Learn more in Same-session audiences →

Best practices

Troubleshooting

Common issues and detailed resolutions

Filter value suggestions not appearing

Ensure you’ve enabled column suggestions.

If suggestions are enabled but missing, refresh them in the filter UI.

Error: column "…" does not exist in _ht_with_column_casts

This occurs when a model column was deleted but cached in Hightouch.

Preview and re-save the model configuration to refresh cached columns.

What’s next?

After creating audiences, you can activate and measure them using these related features:

• Sync audiences to destinations →
• Add traits for filtering →
• Orchestrate campaigns with journeys →
• Reuse audiences with templates →