Audience Concepts

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

Use this page to understand how audiences work before you build one. The walkthrough lives in Building an audience.

An audience is a definition, not a list

An audience is a set of conditions. Every time it is previewed, exported, or synced, the conditions run against your current data. An audience you built in March reflects July's visitors when you sync it in July, and the same audience can return a different count on two different days without the definition changing.

You maintain a description of the people you want, and membership follows your data.

Two kinds of conditions

Visitor properties describe who someone is: consent, attribution, location, and any properties you send. See Visitor conditions.

Event behavior describes what someone did: how many times they performed an event in a rolling window, optionally narrowed to specific occurrences. See Event conditions.

Use either on its own or both together. When both sections have conditions, a visitor has to satisfy both. An audience needs at least one condition before it can be previewed, exported, or published.

Two names

The Name is for your team. Be as descriptive as you like; it never leaves Ours Privacy.

The Export Name is the only label that leaves. It appears in CSV file names and in the advertising platform's own interface, so it should say nothing about who is in the list. See Export names.

Published

Saving keeps your edits. Publishing marks the audience as ready to run on its own. A CSV export does not require publishing; a daily sync does. You can unpublish an audience to stop it running.

Exporting and syncing

Both start from the same definition.

	Export a CSV	Sync to a destination
Who triggers it	You, each time	Runs daily on its own
What you get	A file you upload yourself	Membership delivered to the platform
Formats	All fields, or a Google or Meta layout	Whatever the platform requires
Removals	You manage them in the platform	Depends on the destination

Neither filters on consent. If consent bears on who may be shared, add it as a condition. See Exporting a CSV and Syncing to destinations.

Audience Destinations

Most destinations receive events. An Audience Destination receives membership: the people currently in an audience. It has no allowed events or mappings, only credentials and identifier settings, and the audience decides who is sent.

Some platforms appear twice for this reason. MNTN has an events destination for measurement and a separate MNTN Audiences destination for targeting. Running both is normal. See Audience Destinations.

Identifiers and match rates

Each destination matches on specific identifiers, usually email or phone. A visitor who matches your conditions but has none of the identifiers that destination uses is skipped. Ours Privacy shows how many members were delivered against how many were in the audience, so the gap is visible.

On the platform side, only people the platform already recognizes are matched. The audience there will be smaller than your count, sometimes much smaller, and nothing reports that as an error. When a synced audience underperforms, check the delivered count in Ours Privacy and the match figure in the platform.

Next Steps

Building an audience for the end-to-end walkthrough.
Visitor conditions and Event conditions for what you can filter on.
Compliance for audiences before you sync.

Need help? Contact support@oursprivacy.com.