About audience levels and user tables

User tables with a single audience level

When you map a user table, you must specify at least one audience level to be the primary audience of that table.

During this step, Audience Central associates the field(s) you specified when creating the audience level with the identifier field(s) in the user table. By doing this, you have specified that by default, when Audience Central makes selections from this user table, IDs are returned from the primary audience level.

For example, if you create an audience level named Account with the field Acct_ID, and select this audience level as the primary audience when mapping the user table Accounts, you have associated the Account_ID audience level field with the field in the user table that is the unique identifier (primary key) for the Accounts database table.

User tables with multiple audience levels

A user table can be associated with multiple audience levels, with one of the audience levels designated as the primary audience level, and the remaining audience levels as alternate audience levels.

For example, a user table that contains data about customer accounts could have the following columns:

• Acct_ID
• Indiv_ID
• HHold_ID

In this table, the Acct_ID might be unique for each record. Because an individual could have multiple accounts, and a household could contain multiple individuals, multiple records could have the same values for the Indiv_ID and HHold_ID fields.

Assuming you have three audience levels, Account, Customer, and Household, when you map this user table, you could specify all three of these audience levels and associate them with the corresponding fields listed above in the user table.