Audience Naming Conventions

Introduction

As an account's audience library grows, inconsistent names make it hard to find, group, and audit audiences. Audience Naming Conventions give admins a way to define reusable name templates — with dropdowns, free-text fields, and fixed tokens — that anyone building an audience can select and fill in. Optionally, you can require that every new audience use a convention.

This feature replaces ad-hoc naming guidelines and prefix conventions with structured, account-level rules that the platform enforces for you.

How It Works

A naming convention is a template with two kinds of tokens:

  • {{VariableName}} — a required dropdown. The admin defines the allowed values.
  • {{input}} — an optional free-text field for custom text.

Literal text in the template appears as-is in the generated name.

Example template: {{Team}}_{{Channel}}_{{input}}

With Team = ["growth", "retention", "brand"] and Channel = ["email", "sms", "push"], a user building an audience would pick values from the dropdowns and optionally add custom text, producing names like growth_email_spring-promo or retention_sms_winback-q2.

Admins can define multiple conventions — one per team, one per campaign type, or any combination that fits the account's governance needs.

Configuring Conventions (Admin)

Conventions are managed from Account → Settings → Audiences. The page contains two sections: Audience Similarity Enforcement (a separate feature) and Audience Naming.

Admin page for Audience Naming with one expanded rule showing template and variable options

Adding a convention

  1. Click Add Rule.
  2. Give the rule a Convention Name — this is what end users see in the dropdown when building an audience.
  3. Enter a Template using {{VariableName}} and optional {{input}} tokens.
  4. For each variable in the template, configure:
    • Label — display name shown on the form field.
    • Options — the list of allowed values, added as chips (click each chip's × to remove).
  5. Save the rule.

You can add as many rules as you need, and expand or collapse each rule's card to keep the list tidy.

Enforcing conventions

A separate account setting, Enforce Audience Naming Conventions, controls whether users must pick a convention when creating or editing an audience:

EnforcementUser experience
OffUsers see a "Naming Convention" dropdown that includes None. They can either pick a convention or type a name freely.
OnThe None option is hidden — users must pick one of the defined conventions.
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If enforcement is turned on but no rules exist, users can still save audiences with free-form names. The builder shows a banner reminding admins that conventions won't be enforced until at least one rule is defined.

Using a Convention (Audience Builder)

When a user creates or edits an audience, the builder shows a Naming Convention selector above the name field.

Audience builder with the Naming Convention selector empty — pick a convention to start
  1. Pick a convention from the dropdown. The form below expands with one field per variable plus an optional free-text field (if the template includes {{input}}).
  2. Fill in each variable by picking from its dropdown. Enter any custom text in the free-text field.
  3. The audience Name field updates automatically as you fill in values, and is locked against manual edits — a lock icon on the right of the field and the helper text "Name is generated from the selected convention" explain why.
Audience builder with a convention applied — per-variable dropdowns, free-text field, locked Name field with lock icon

To choose a different convention, re-open the selector and pick a different rule — the form fields update to match.

Editing an existing audience

When a user opens an existing audience whose name matches one of the defined conventions, Lytics auto-detects the convention and pre-fills the variable values. If the existing name doesn't match any convention:

  • With enforcement off, the audience keeps its current name unless the user picks a convention.
  • With enforcement on, the user is prompted to pick a convention to save changes.

Scope

  • Conventions apply to user-table audiences (the standard audience builder). Content-table and other document-type segments are unaffected.
  • The feature applies both when creating a new audience and when editing an existing one.
  • Conventions do not retroactively rename existing audiences — names only change when a user saves an audience with a convention selected.

Tips

  • Keep variable dropdowns short. Long lists slow down the name-building workflow; split a single overloaded convention into two separate rules instead.
  • Use {{input}} for the part of the name that varies per audience (e.g., the campaign name), and variables for the dimensions you want to report on or filter by later.
  • Enforce conventions only after you've created a rule set that covers your common audience types — otherwise builders will be blocked on workflows you haven't designed for yet.

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