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Customer Issue
Users may experience situations where an existing audience becomes unavailable and does not appear in the active or archived audience lists. Additionally, campaigns scheduled to these audiences may result in "silent" delivery failures, where the campaign appears to send successfully but reaches zero users. In some cases, users may find they cannot see any targeted users for any campaigns if their own administrative permissions are restricted by one of these affected audiences.
Environment
- Creator Studio | People | Audiences
- Creator Studio | Campaigns | Deliver
Issue Details
An audience enters an "erroneous" state when its underlying query becomes structurally invalid or references resources that are no longer available. This state is currently permanent and can "poison" other audiences; if a "child" audience becomes erroneous, any "parent" audience that references it will also fail.
Known causes include:
-
Circular Referencing: Audience A references Audience B, which in turn references Audience A.
- Archived Dependencies: An audience is used as a criterion in a second audience, and the first audience is subsequently archived.
- Missing Attributes: A custom attribute used in an audience query is deleted or fails to migrate.
- SCIM Renaming: An audience is renamed via SCIM, but other audiences still reference the old name.
- Invalid Syntax: Structural errors in the audience query logic.
Impact:
- Silent Failures: Campaigns resolve to 0 users without a warning at the time of scheduling.
- Permission Issues: If an erroneous audience is used to define a user's permission scope, that user may see 0 users for all campaigns.
- Visibility: Erroneous audiences are hidden from standard Studio lists, making them difficult to identify.
Resolution
Our engineering team is working on a permanent fix to prevent audiences from entering this state and to allow for automatic recovery once a conflict is resolved.
Current Workarounds:
Identify & Recreate: If a campaign shows 0 users, check the nested audiences. If a referenced audience has been archived, remove that criteria and recreate the logic using active groups.
Unarchive Dependencies: If you know a specific audience was archived that is needed by others, temporarily unarchiving it may restore the dependent audiences.
Remove Permissions: Bad audiences will show in red in users' permissions, and can be removed to avoid this causing issues in areas where those permissions are applied.
Contact Support: If you cannot locate an audience or suspect "permission poisoning," please contact Firstup Support. Support can identify the specific broken reference and, if necessary, engage Engineering to manually re-enable the audience via backend intervention.
Please check the current status of this issue on the Known Issues Tracker. (Issue ID: FE-7404)
Comments
2 comments
The ticket reference for this issue has been updated, please see the article title for the new reference
We have updated this article to include additional scenarios that can cause audiences to enter an "erroneous" state, such as referencing archived audiences or deleted attributes. We have also added information regarding "silent" delivery failures and impacts on user permissions.
Article is closed for comments.