Troubleshooting Advanced Segments

If you're unable to manage or send to an advanced segment in your audience, there are a few things that could be going on.

In this article, you'll learn what can cause problems with advanced segments, and some tips to help you troubleshoot.

My segment isn't available to send to

• Some segments may not be available for your campaign type.
  Advanced segments aren't available for automations or RSS emails, because they usually involve multiple sends. If your segment isn't properly updated, this could lead to content being delivered to the wrong contacts, or not being delivered at all. If you need to include RSS content in an email with an advanced segment, consider adding RSS feed content to a regular email.

My segment's contact count seems wrong

There are a few things that can cause your contact count to appear incorrect in your segment.

• Your and/or logic is set up incorrectly.
  Review how your and/or logic is set up in your segment and make sure you've selected the correct logic for your top-level group. For example, if you're using and logic for the top-level group, contacts must meet the conditions for all of the groups in your segment. If there are no contacts who meet those conditions, your count will be zero.
• The segment needs to be updated.
  When an advanced segment is generated, it’ll take a snapshot of the subscribed contacts who meet its conditions at that time. This snapshot won’t capture new subscribed contacts who join the audience and meet the segment conditions. To update your segment before sending your email, turn on Finalize your recipients at send time by clicking the Schedule button.
  
• Your contacts don't have the necessary data.
  Advanced segments don't always take empty fields into consideration like regular segments do. When you use operators such as is, is not, contains, or does not contain, the system may exclude contacts who don't have data for the field specified in your segment. Learn more about operator logic in advanced segmentation.

I don't see the condition I want to use

You may notice that a condition for a segment doesn't appear to be available. Here are a few reasons this might happen.

• The condition isn't available.
  Take a look at the advanced segmentation options to see if the condition you want is available. If you need to use a condition that isn't available in advanced segments, you can still accomplish your goal. First, create a regular segment that uses the condition you need, then create a tag for all the contacts in that segment. When you build your advanced segment, choose the tag you created as one of your conditions.
• You're trying to segment by something new in your account.
  It can take some time for changes in your account to appear in your segmenting options, such as a new integration or a recently sent email. We recommend that you allow up to 2 hours for recent data changes to become available as segmenting conditions.
• You don't have the necessary data in your account.
  The segmenting filters you have depend on what data is available to you in your account and in your audience. For example, if you don't have groups set up in your audience, you won't have the option to segment by group.

My segment is taking too long to generate or failed to generate

Sometimes, the way your advanced segment is set up can cause it to take a long time to generate, or not generate at all. Here are a few things to look for.

• Your top-level group doesn't contain conditions.
  If your segment only contains conditions in sub-groups and not in the top-level group, it may fail to generate. You should be able to move at least 1 condition into your top-level group, and keep the outcome of your segment the same. Take a look at how your segment is structured and determine which conditions could be moved into your top-level group.
• One of your conditions is blank or incomplete.
  If your segment contains a condition that doesn't specify the necessary criteria, you'll receive an error message that your segment failed to generate. For example, if you include a condition for Email Address > contains but don't specify what it should contain, you'll get an error message when you attempt to run your segment. Edit your segment to correct any errors, then re-run your segment.
• Your conditions use field-related data.
  Conditions that use audience field data are more complex for our system to process, so segments that contain multiple field-related conditions will take longer to generate. To reduce the time your segment takes to generate, consider other condition types that don't require audience field data. Take a look at All the Segmenting Options to see what's available to you or learn more about advanced segments.
• Your segment contains too many conditions.
  Each condition in your segment requires our system to reference data in your account, so the more conditions you include in your segment, the longer it takes to generate. Complex segments can often be simplified to combine conditions or remove unnecessary conditions, which should reduce the time it takes to generate.