Sometimes you may find creating an audience in Creator Studio easier by simply copying and pasting a list of emails into the query builder. Reasons for this can range. Here's a highlight of some common use cases:

• You want to be able to edit the list of users after creating the audience, but "import" creates a static snapshot that cannot be edited
• You want to avoid creating users
• You do not have the first and last names required for the user import file

Copy and Paste Emails into Advanced Query

All users must have an activated profile on the Users page in order for this solution to work. They can be in any state of registration (Created, Invited, Registering, or Registered) and they can have any level of activity (e.g., 3 months ago or none).



Note: This solution requires that you have a list of the users by unique identifier, and for this article we are focusing on email. You can adapt this solution for copying and pasting other unique identifiers, just make sure to adjust the "primary_email:" string in your formula. Steps to get the code for a particular attribute are described at the end of this guide.

1. Open your preferred spreadsheet software and create a new sheet.
2. Enter all email addresses into Column A in your spreadsheet. 
3. In Column B, to the right of the first email value, enter the formula ="primary_email:"""&A2&""" OR". This is a concatenation that will combine specific text with the email values so that we end up with primary_email:"employee@firstup.io" OR for every user that you need to add to this audience.
   • The example assumes you enter a header in cell A1 such as "email address". The exact header does not matter for this solution. If your list has no header, your formula may say ="primary_email:"""&A1&""" OR". 
     
     
     
     
4. Replicate the formula down Column B so that every email value is captured.
5. Select and copy all values in Column B.
6. Sign into Creator Studio, navigate to People > Audiences.
   • If creating a new audience, click the + Audience button.
   • If updating an existing audience, edit the audience.
     
     
     
     
     
7. Click More and select Advanced query builder.
   
   
   
   
8. Delete the asterisk (*) or any other existing text.
   
   
   
   
9. Paste your copied text from Column B into the query field.
10. IMPORTANT: remove the very last OR. Your query is not valid if it ends with OR.
    
    
    
    
11. Enter a name and description for your audience and click Save.
    
    

Large Query Note

The Advanced Query tool is not meant for extremely large queries. If you run into timeout errors when pasting thousands of lines of text, consider splitting your query into multiple audiences of no more than 10,000 users each. Then, you can create one master audience that refers to the smaller audiences as follows:

1. Take a snapshot of each audience. The Snapshot feature is optimized for space and time and will be efficient to store and execute.
   Caveat: audience snapshots are immutable after created. If in the future the membership of the audience must change, it requires creating a new audience.
2. Create a new audience and add the Audiences filter. Select each of the snapshots.
3. To edit the members of this audience, modify one of the original email list audiences and take a new snapshot. Remove the old snapshot and add the new one to the combined audience.

Best Practice When Using Large Audiences

• If you have master audiences referencing multiple audiences with above 10k lines that have not been converted to snapshots, you may experience issues with the  Audience page, specifically timeouts when scrolling through the list, or searching
• In addition to this, adding these non-snapshot audiences to a Campaign may result in the review page showing that it will deliver to 0 users.  This is a visual issue, and the Campaign will actually send as expected.
  
  
  
• When creating a master audience that references multiple 10k audiences, it is important that these are converted to snapshot audiences before being referenced in the master.  Not doing so can result in the Audience total showing 0 users and you are unable to save due to 'invalid query' error
  
  
  
  
• Finally, it is recommended that copy/paste Audiences are created by Brand Super Admins, as creating these audiences as restricted users can result in complex Audience scopes that take longer to resolve and load on the Audience page.
  
  Furthermore if a copy/paste audience is created by a restricted user and then assigned under another user's restrictions, this will further complicate the Audience scope, creating additional  load times.  The more Audiences of this nature that start to populate the Audience page, the longer it will take to load and you may start to experience errors as a result of these large load times.

Troubleshoot Query

If you are having issues with your query being detected as valid, check the following:

• All caps "OR" between all email values
  • primary_email:rachel.king@firstup.io OR primary_email:angela.frey@firstup.io
• Confirm there is no trailing OR at the end of the last formula. See step #10 above.
• Make sure there are no single quotes such as primary_email:'rachel.king@firstup.io'.
  • Either omit quotation marks or use double quotation marks such as primary_email:"rachel.king@firstup.io".
• Remove any leading spaces, e.g. primary_email: "angela.frey@firstup.io". 
  • The correct format would be primary_email:"angela.frey@firstup.io".

Different Attributes

The steps above focus on adding users based on their email address. However the method above can be used for any user attribute.

To get the query code for any attribute:

1. Create a new audience. There is no need to save this audience.
2. Add the attribute that you are interested in using and select any item for that attribute.
   
   
3. Switch to the advanced query builder.
   
   
4. Copy the attribute code from the query. Use this in place of "primary_email" in the steps above,