Incremental Activation is a Beta release. For more information, contact your Customer Success Representative.
Incremental Activation, also known as Delta Activation, enables you to activate only the changes (delta) in your segment data rather than exporting the entire segment each time. This feature helps reduce costs on third-party platforms that charge per profile or data point, optimizes performance by reducing payload sizes, and ensures more accurate customer journey orchestration.
- Reduce Third-Party Platform Costs: Send only new or changed profiles to platforms like Braze, Google Ads, or Meta, avoiding charges for re-sending unchanged data
- Optimize Performance: Prevent connector failures and delays by reducing payload sizes
- Improve Journey Accuracy: Prevent users from re-entering journeys due to repeated activations
- Support Compliance: Ensure users who request data erasure are properly removed from activation targets
Incremental Activation compares your current segment data with the previous activation snapshot to identify changes. Based on your configuration, the workflow automatically sends only the delta (changes) to your destination platform:
- New profiles: Profiles added to the segment since the last activation
- Updated profiles: Profiles whose attributes changed since the last activation
- Deleted profiles: Profiles removed from the segment since the last activation
- Unchanged profiles: Profiles that remain the same
You control how each type of change is handled by configuring activation mappings that match your destination platform's capabilities.
- Export only new concert ticket buyers to Meta and TikTok without rebuilding audiences
- Reduce daily payloads to Google Ads and Salesforce Marketing Cloud by activating only net-new entries
- Send only newly qualified profiles to Braze to optimize data point usage
- Automatically remove profiles from third-party platforms when users exercise their right to be forgotten (GDPR/CCPA)
- Maintain accurate opt-out lists across marketing platforms
- Prevent "overloading" downstream systems with large, repetitive data exports
- Stay within platform-imposed profile activation limits
Before using Incremental Activation, ensure you have:
- Permission to create, edit, and run workflows
- Permission to create, update, and delete tables under the source database (TD database)
- Permission to use and edit Segments in Audience Studio
- Permission to use result export connectors
- A valid authentication configured for your destination connector
To use Incremental Activation, you'll complete two main phases:
- Workflow Setup: Create a user-defined workflow using the Incremental Activation template and configure it for your needs
- Use the Workflow: Either run it as an Activation Action within Audience Studio or as a standalone workflow
See Configure Incremental Activation for detailed setup instructions.
Incremental Activation supports different modes depending on your destination platform's capabilities:
Sends only new profiles to the destination. Previously activated profiles that no longer qualify remain in the third-party platform.
Best for: Platforms like Braze and Google Ads where cumulative lists are cost-effective.
Sends new or changed profiles to the destination. Previously activated profiles that no longer qualify remain in the third-party platform.
Best for: Platforms where you want to update profile attributes without removing disqualified profiles.
Clears the entire destination list and replaces it with currently qualified profiles. Any profile not in the current segment is removed.
Best for: Salesforce Marketing Cloud and other platforms requiring precision targeting.
Requirements: Destination platform must support both add and remove operations, or a replace operation.
Adds new profiles and explicitly removes profiles that no longer qualify from the destination.
Best for: Meta Custom Audiences and platforms where keeping the list perfectly synchronized is critical.
Requirements: Destination platform must support both add and remove operations.
- Platform Support: Not all result export connectors support dynamic mode configuration. Verify your connector supports the required operations (add, update, remove, or replace).
- Initial Run: When no previous activation history exists, a full export is performed automatically.
- Delta Key Changes: If you change the delta identification key, a full export is triggered.
- Behavior Activations: Not currently supported with Incremental Activation.
- TikTok Limitations: TikTok's Custom Audience API has limited support for removing users and processes updates asynchronously (up to 48 hours).
- Concurrent Execution: The table used by the workflow is not locked during operation. Do not schedule multiple workflows to run concurrently on the same source table to avoid state conflicts.
- Configure Incremental Activation
- Incremental Activation Parameters
- Incremental Activation Mappings
- Troubleshooting Incremental Activation