I stumbled upon Firebase’s video of their 2019 progress and we can see that they’ve done a lot. One of the new features they’ve released completely under my radar is the new Audience Builder and I have to say it is looking slick!
Right off the bat we have a custom and suggested audience selection! Being the model closer to the old builder, I dived first into the custom audience builder and I was pleasantly surprised.
There’s quite a few new things to look at here. We’ve always been able to define users by static conditions met across one or all sessions but now in addition to that, we have a sequence builder to put a user in the audience if they meet certain conditions in a specific order, potentially within a time limit as well. This is something I’m going to be playing around with.
One thing you might have noticed is the sidebar on the right. We’ve got a summary of how many users would belong to the audience based on our set conditions which is nice. It’s showing 0 for me cause I’m a bit of a knob.
Then we got the membership duration which defines how long a user lingers in the audience after meeting all the conditions for the last time. This means if a user no longer meets the conditions of the audience, he will linger for 30 days or so before he is kicked out (The maximum limit is 540 days). I don’t know if this has been around before, but it’s certainly a nice touch.
Next we have the suggested audiences and what you’re seeing here is the Non-purchasers option presented right at us and as you’d expect, it gives us options to use where we just have to set the parameters. Look at that, it even includes and exclude function.
Next is the templates and well, what can I say? I like it. Quickly setting up our options to let us define only the custom parameters we want to set, saving us sweet development time and letting us sleep? That’s what these tools are all about!
I’ve always thought of User Segmentation as a powerful tool and with the new audience builder, I can only see it becoming more prominent moving forward.