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.
Adding a convention
- Click Add Rule.
- Give the rule a Convention Name — this is what end users see in the dropdown when building an audience.
- Enter a Template using
{{VariableName}}and optional{{input}}tokens. - 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).
- 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:
| Enforcement | User experience |
|---|---|
| Off | Users see a "Naming Convention" dropdown that includes None. They can either pick a convention or type a name freely. |
| On | The None option is hidden — users must pick one of the defined conventions. |
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.
- 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}}). - Fill in each variable by picking from its dropdown. Enter any custom text in the free-text field.
- 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.
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.
Related
- Audiences — Creating and managing audiences
- Audience Groups — Grouping audiences into folders