User Syncing and Audiences

User syncing, also known as cookie matching, is the process of matching different cookies on various systems to identify a user and place that user in segments for targeting. BidCore uses the BidSwitch UUID pool to match cookies across many different platforms.

Once you sync your users with BidSwitch, you can then place those users into segments for targeting in BidCore, see the Audience Segments Overview section for details. To get user syncing access and instructions, contact your account manager or BidCore support for details.

Audience Segments Overview

In BidCore you can group users into segments to create audiences, and then use audiences for targeting. You can manage your own users and their segments (first-party) and/or extend this management to a data provider (third-party). To create audiences, you need to upload a .tsv file to the BidCore backend. Contact your account manager or BidCore support to get ssh credentials.

The uploaded file should contain your users in the BidSwitch UUID format and a list of segments to which each belongs. Once validated, the segments can be seen on the Audiences page in the UI and become available when configuring line items.

Configuring Audience Segments

There’s a number of caveats when uploading the .tsv files.

  • When you upload a new .tsv file, previously created segments and their users are updated with any additional details, i.e. you can append new users to an existing segment or an existing user can be added to new segments.

  • You must use unique file names because if you upload a new file with the same name as a previously processed file, it won’t be processed. To avoid this, add a unique identifier to the file name e.g. a timestamp segments_audience_2019-08-26.tsv.

  • Each line in the .tsv file uses the following syntax:

<USER_ID>\t<segmentID1>:<Exp_time1>,<segmentID2>:<Exp_time2>

TSV Fields

Description and Data Type

User ID

(Required) Sets the User ID using BidSwitch’s UUID v4 format or IFA for app users. To match your user pool with the BidSwitch user pool, see the User Syncing and Audiences section.

Segments

(Required) A list of comma-separated strings defining the segments to which the user belongs. Segment names can only use letters, dash, underscore, or numbers, [a-zA-Z0-9-_], and must be ASCII characters. There is no limit to the number of segments to which a user can belong, e.g. app-seg_1,site-seg_2,NYC-seg-3

Expiration time

(Optional) A unix timestamp defining when the User ID’s inclusion in the segment expires. This can be appended to the segment name using a colon, e.g. segment1:1567981023.

  • To remove a user from a segment, set their expiration time to 0.

  • Users are removed from a segment by default after 30 days.

  • The maximum expiration value you can set is 60 day from today.

Example Segment File

00d05958-0c59-1a34-b7c0-74002efacfbd\t47896:1567981023,47923:1567981123
12a0dac0-7510-1234-8540-f77f3e651fd9\t47907:1567980952
136702ab-fdbf-1234-ba95-b07894a14baf\t47896:1567981113
16b1a483-161c-12aa-812a-2a598abd6fce\t47896:1567980882,47953:1567981145
17f9e3f0-8d5f-1aa4-ad84-a6ff8f18275d\t47907:1567980961
1d6e52b1-a561-12a4-ae20-14addac8a3da\t47907:1567981172,47900:1567981654
1e740d18-bc6a-1ab4-bfb1-7890f6b141e3\t47896:1567981132
21b25c2e-caee-12ab-a152-b451892090a9\t47907:1567981022
230ef5e6-7eb0-1234-a8c1-2da8a4612886\t47896:1567981123