Audience Concepts

The mental model behind Ours Privacy audiences - what an audience is, why it carries two names, how conditions combine, what published means, and how exporting differs from syncing.

Use this page to understand what an audience actually is in Ours Privacy before you build one. Everything here explains the model; the walkthrough lives in Building an audience.

Important: Advertising platforms are not HIPAA business associates and do not sign BAAs. Hashing an email does not make it anonymous. Read Compliance for audiences before sending an audience to any platform.

An audience is a definition, not a list

An audience is a set of conditions, not a saved list of people. Nothing is frozen at the moment you create it. Every time the audience is used, whether for a preview, a CSV export, or a daily sync, the conditions run again against your current data and produce the membership as of that moment.

That is why an audience you built in March can be synced in July and reflect July's visitors. It is also why the same audience can return a different count two days in a row without anything having changed in the definition.

Why it matters: you never maintain a list. You maintain a description of the people you want, and membership follows your data. The flip side is that an audience is only as good as the criteria you wrote, and a condition that is subtly too broad stays subtly too broad on every run until you fix it.

Two kinds of conditions

Conditions come from two places, and the distinction matters because they answer different questions.

Visitor properties describe who someone is: the consent categories they accepted or rejected, the UTM parameters on their first visit, their city or country, and any custom properties you send. These are attributes on the visitor record. See Visitor conditions.

Event behavior describes what someone did: how many times they fired a given event inside a rolling window, optionally narrowed to the events whose own properties match a filter. See Event conditions.

You can use either alone or both together, and both sections support AND and OR between their conditions. When you use both sections, a visitor has to satisfy both. The most precise audiences are usually a visitor property baseline (consent, attribution) plus an event pattern (funnel stage, engagement).

An audience with no conditions at all is not usable. Preview, export, and publish all require at least one condition, because an audience with no conditions means everybody.

Every audience carries two names

This is the part that is unusual, and it exists for a specific reason.

The Name is yours. It is as descriptive as you want, it stays inside Ours Privacy, and nobody outside your account ever sees it. "Visited the addiction recovery page twice, never booked a consult" is a good internal name.

The Export Name is the only string that leaves. It appears in the file name of every CSV you download and it is the label an advertising platform displays in its own interface. That name is a disclosure on its own: the platform learns what the audience is about, independently of who is in it and independently of whether identifiers were hashed.

So Ours Privacy keeps them separate rather than deriving one from the other. Deriving is the whole problem, because any transformation of addiction-recovery-visitors still says addiction. See Export names for how to set one, and Health context in audience names for what Ours Privacy refuses to accept.

Published means ready to run on its own

Saving an audience keeps your edits. Publishing marks the definition as the one that automated processes should use. An audience needs at least one condition before it can be published, and a published audience can be unpublished if you want it to stop running.

Downloading a CSV does not require publishing, because you are asking for a result right now. A daily sync does, because nobody is present to confirm that the current draft is what you meant.

Exporting and syncing are different acts

Both start from the same audience definition, but they behave differently enough that it is worth being explicit.

	Export a CSV	Sync to a destination
Who triggers it	You, each time	Runs daily on its own
What you get	A file you download and upload yourself	Membership delivered to the platform
Formats	All fields raw, or a Google or Meta layout	The platform's own required form
Identifiers included	Depends on the format, up to ten columns	A hashed email address, nothing else
Advertising consent	Rejections are included in the file	Rejections are excluded automatically
Removals	You manage them in the platform	Each run replaces the previous list

The consent difference is deliberate. A CSV is data you asked for about your own visitors, and you may need the complete set for reasons that have nothing to do with advertising. A sync goes to an advertising platform, so visitors who rejected the advertising consent category are left out on the way. See Exporting a CSV and Syncing to destinations.

Audience Destinations are not event destinations

Most destinations in Ours Privacy receive events: a visitor did something, and that fact is forwarded with your mappings applied. An Audience Destination receives membership instead: here are the people currently in this audience.

That difference shows up in the setup. An Audience Destination has no allowed events and no event mappings, only credentials, and the audience itself decides who gets sent. It also means you cannot sync an audience to an ordinary event destination, and selecting an event destination is not offered.

Some platforms appear twice for exactly this reason. MNTN has an events destination that measures what your campaigns drove and a separate MNTN Audiences destination that gives MNTN people to target. Running both is normal. See Audience Destinations.

Email is the only identifier a sync matches on

A CSV export can include up to ten identifier columns depending on the format you pick. A sync sends one: a hashed email address.

The practical consequence is that a visitor with no email address on their record cannot be part of a synced audience, no matter how well they match your conditions. They are skipped, and Ours Privacy records how many members were delivered against how many were in the audience so the gap is visible rather than silent.

If most of your audience has no email address, the fix is in how you capture email, or in adding a condition that requires one. It is not something the platform can solve.

A low match rate is not an error

Platforms match a hashed email only against people they already recognize. The audience on the platform side will be smaller than your count, sometimes much smaller, and nothing about that produces a failure. The upload succeeds, the platform reports the audience as active, and it simply matches fewer people than you expected.

This is the one failure mode neither system reports, so it is worth knowing the two numbers to check: how many members Ours Privacy delivered against the audience total, and whatever match figure the platform reports on its side. See Audience Destinations.

Next Steps

Building an audience for the end-to-end walkthrough.
Visitor conditions and Event conditions for the condition inventory.
Export names for the naming model in practice.
Compliance for audiences for what you are responsible for before syncing.

Need help? Contact support@oursprivacy.com.