Priorities

Priorities let you manage audience overlap by defining which audiences take precedence when a customer qualifies for multiple segments. This prevents customers from receiving conflicting messages or being targeted by too many campaigns simultaneously.

The Overlap Problem

When you have multiple active audiences, some customers inevitably qualify for more than one. For example:

• “High-Value Customers” — lifetime_value > 500
• “Churning Customers” — days_since_last_purchase > 60
• “Win-Back Campaign” — inactive for 90+ days

A customer with a lifetime value of $800 who hasn’t purchased in 95 days qualifies for all three audiences. If each audience is synced to a different campaign, this customer could receive a VIP offer, a churn prevention email, and a win-back discount — all at the same time.

Priorities solve this by letting you declare: “If a customer qualifies for both High-Value and Churning, treat them as High-Value.”

How Priorities Work

A priority is an ordered list of audiences. When evaluated, Zeotap processes the audiences from highest to lowest priority:

1. Start with the highest-priority audience
2. Assign all qualifying members to that audience
3. Move to the next audience
4. Assign qualifying members who haven’t already been assigned
5. Repeat until all audiences in the list are processed

The result is that each customer is assigned to at most one audience in the priority. Customers who qualify for multiple audiences are assigned to the highest-priority one.

Priority: "Retention Campaign Targeting"

Priority 1: High-Value Customers       → 5,000 members assigned
Priority 2: Churning Customers         → 3,200 members assigned (excluding those already in High-Value)
Priority 3: Win-Back Campaign          → 1,800 members assigned (excluding those in High-Value or Churning)
Priority 4: General Re-engagement      → 8,000 members assigned (excluding all above)

Creating a Priority

The create flow is three steps.

Step 1: Select a Parent Model

Navigate to Activation > Priorities and start a new one. Pick the parent model the priority is about. Every audience you can add is one built on that model, which is what makes de-duplication meaningful — the audiences are all describing the same population.

Step 2: Add Audiences in Priority Order

Add audiences and arrange them. The audience at the top has the highest priority and claims its members first.

Step 3: Name and Save

Give the priority a name and an optional description explaining the business logic behind the order, then save.

The Detail Page

The detail page names the priority’s parent model and lists its audiences in Audience Priority Order, where you can reorder them, add another, or remove one.

A priority is a definition, not a materialized result: the de-duplication is applied when a sync built on the priority runs. To see how many members each audience actually claimed, read the runs of the syncs that consumed it.

Syncing with Priorities

When you create a sync for an audience that belongs to a priority, the sync uses the de-duplicated membership — not the original audience membership.

This means:

• The destination receives only the customers assigned to that audience after priority resolution
• No customer appears in more than one destination from the same priority
• The resolution happens when the sync runs, as part of the query — it is not stored and does not need recomputing. Change the order and the next run reflects it.

Example: Email Campaign Prioritization

A marketing team runs four email campaigns and wants to ensure no customer receives more than one:

The 500 VIP customers who also abandoned a cart receive the VIP campaign (Priority 1), not the cart abandonment email (Priority 2). The 3,000 customers who would have received the feature announcement but are already in VIP or Cart Abandoners get their higher-priority campaign instead.

Editing a Priority

Reordering Audiences

Change the order on the detail page. Because the de-duplication is computed when a sync runs, the new order takes effect on the next run of every sync built on the priority’s audiences — there is nothing to recompute and nothing to re-save downstream.

Adding an Audience

An audience added above another claims members the one below it used to get. Added at the bottom, it gets only what nothing above it claimed.

Removing an Audience

Its members are released and claimed by whichever lower-priority audience they also qualify for — or by nothing, if they qualify for nothing else.

One Priority per Audience

Create a separate priority for each channel whose overlap you want to control:

• “Email campaign prioritization” — controls overlap for email campaigns
• “Ad platform prioritization” — controls overlap for ad audiences
• “Push notification prioritization” — controls overlap for push campaigns

Keep each audience in one priority. A sync resolves the priority its audience belongs to, and an audience listed in two has no defined answer to which one applies. If two channels need different orderings of the same population, give each its own audiences.

Best Practices

• Prioritize by business value — Put audiences representing higher-value actions or more time-sensitive messages at the top
• Keep priorities focused — Create separate priorities for separate channels (email, ads, push) rather than one giant list
• Watch the delivered counts — a low-priority audience that consistently claims almost nobody is a sign its population is already covered above it
• Document the rationale — Use the description field to explain why audiences are ordered the way they are, so team members understand the business logic
• Review after audience changes — widening an audience high in the order takes members from everything below it

Next Steps

• Audiences — Build the audiences to prioritize
• A/B Tests — Divide audiences for experimentation
• Syncs — Activate de-duplicated audiences to destinations