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ActivationAudiencesAudience Preview

Audience Preview

Audience preview lets you inspect a sample of entity records that match your audience definition before saving or activating. This helps you verify that the right entities are being captured by your filter conditions.

How Preview Works

When you click Preview in the audience builder, Zeotap:

  1. Compiles the filter conditions into a SQL query
  2. Adds a LIMIT clause to return only a sample (up to 100 rows)
  3. Joins entity attributes and computed attribute values to the result
  4. Executes the query against your warehouse
  5. Displays the results in a table view

The preview runs the actual audience query (not a sampled estimate), so the members shown are real matches — not approximations. The LIMIT simply caps the number of results returned for performance.

Preview Columns

The preview table displays the following columns:

Column TypeDescription
Entity KeyThe primary identifier for the entity (e.g., user_id)
Entity AttributesKey attributes from the entity type’s mapped table (e.g., email, name, country)
Computed Attribute ValuesThe current materialized values of computed attributes referenced in the audience conditions
Additional Computed AttributesOther computed attributes attached to the entity type, for context

Column Selection

By default, the preview shows:

  • The entity key
  • Up to 5 entity attributes (configurable in the preview settings)
  • All computed attributes referenced in the filter conditions

You can customize which columns are shown by clicking the Columns button above the preview table and toggling columns on or off.

Using Preview Effectively

Validate Filter Logic

After building your conditions, preview the members and ask:

  • Are these the types of entities I intended to target?
  • Do the computed attribute values look reasonable for the conditions I set?
  • Are there any unexpected records that suggest a filter condition is too broad?

Spot Data Issues

Preview can reveal data quality problems:

  • Null values in unexpected columns may indicate incomplete data ingestion
  • Extreme outliers (e.g., a lifetime value of $1,000,000) may indicate data errors
  • Duplicate-looking records may suggest identity resolution is needed

Compare Before and After

When editing an audience, preview both before and after your changes to understand how the membership shifts. This is especially useful when tightening or loosening filter conditions.

Preview vs. Estimation

FeatureEstimationPreview
ReturnsApproximate countSample records
Speed2-10 seconds3-15 seconds
AccuracyApproximateExact (for the sample shown)
Use for”How big is this audience?""Who is in this audience?”
SamplingTable-level samplingFull query with LIMIT

Use estimation for quick size checks and preview for qualitative validation of membership.

Preview Limitations

  • Sample size — Preview returns up to 100 records. For audiences with millions of members, this is a small window into the full membership.
  • No ordering guarantee — The preview results are not ordered in any specific way. The 100 records returned are determined by the warehouse’s query execution plan.
  • Stale computed attribute values — If a computed attribute hasn’t been evaluated recently, the preview shows the last materialized values, which may not reflect the latest source data.
  • Preview vs. full evaluation — The preview result is not cached or stored. It’s a one-time query for validation purposes. The actual membership list is only created when you save and evaluate the audience.

Preview from the Audience Detail Page

For saved audiences, you can also access preview from the audience detail page:

  1. Navigate to Activation > Audiences and select an audience
  2. Click the Preview tab
  3. The preview runs against the current filter conditions and displays sample members

This is useful for monitoring an existing audience without entering the edit mode.

Next Steps

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Size EstimationOverview