What are subsets?
Subsets allow organizations to segment their total addressable audience data based on its attributes and then grant employees access to that data based on the segment. For example, some organizations may have a Global Customers table but only want employees to be able to access data in Hightouch from the region in which they work. By creating a subset for each region, companies can assign specific employees to each region and limit the data each employee can view and activate.
Common use cases for subsets
- Consent
- Some companies may collect consent or opt-ins for different marketing use cases. Companies can use subsets to create different filters for each consent type. For example, lifecycle marketers may be assigned to an “Email Opt-Ins” subset, while performance marketers may be assigned to a subset for “Targetable Customers.”
- Region
- In multinational corporations, subsets can help scope employee data access to data within a particular geography or region.
- Brand
- For companies with multiple business units, brands, or product lines, subsets can be applied so that employees can only create audiences with data scoped to their specific business unit, brand, or product.
Subset categories vs. subsets
A parent model can be segmented with subset categories and subsets. In the above example, region is the subset category and each region (North America, EMEA, APAC) is the subset.
When building an audience, you can select more than one subset category and more than one subset within each subset category. A user must be part of any subset within a subset category, and satisfy all subset categories to be part of the audience.
Setting up subsets
To begin configuring your subsets:
- Go to the schema page
- Click on the Parent Model
- Click on the tab labeled Subsets
Creating and defining a subset category
The first step in defining a subset is to create a subset category. A subset category groups multiple subsets together. For example, you may have a Region category that has separate subsets for US, EU, and EMEA.
To create a new category, click Add Category. Name your category and provide a description.
Once a category has been created, you can choose whether to make this category required. When a category is required, users must apply a subset from within that category when creating a new audience. If a user does not have access to any of the subsets in a required category, they will not be able to build any audiences.
Once created, click Add subset to create a subset within that category.
Creating and defining a subset
To create your subset, you can mix and match different conditions to segment
your parent model to a specific filter. Similar to building an audience, the
builder provides five types of filters you can use
with nested Boolean (AND / OR) logic:
- Property conditions
- Related model conditions
- Event conditions
- Audience conditions
- Trait conditions
For more information on how to use the builder UI, see this section here.
Granting access to a subset
Once your filter conditions have been created, select which users should have access to this subset.
Using subsets in audience creation
Once a user is granted access to a specific subset, they can select the subset in the dropdown of the base filters section of the audience builder. If a user does not have access to a specific subset, it will be greyed out.
In the above example, these base filters will allow any user has purchased from the Sketchers brand AND is part of the Australia OR Asia regions to be in this audience.