An audience is a saved group of guests, built by stacking filters until only the people you want are left. Campaigns send to audiences, so this is where you decide who hears from you and who does not.
You will also see them called segments. They are the same thing.
Find them under Profiles > Audiences. Bookboost sets up a few common ones for you when your account is created, so there is usually something there to copy rather than start from nothing.
Select Load Preview or your audience looks empty
The panel on the right shows the guests matching your filters, but only after you select Load Preview. Bookboost does not calculate the audience as you type.
Until you select it the count and the list stay at zero, even when reservations in your system do match. An audience that looks empty is very often one whose preview has not been loaded.
If the preview loads and the audience really is empty, remove your filters one at a time and reload after each, to find the one excluding everyone.
For what each card in that panel means once it has loaded, see Reading the insights panel while building an audience.
How a filter row reads
Select Add Filter and choose from the list. Each entry shows the filter name with a one-line description under it, and the list is long, so it rewards reading rather than scanning.
An added filter appears as a row with four parts: its name, that same description, one or more value pickers, and an Exclude selected toggle. New filters are added at the top of the list rather than the bottom.
Exclude selected is on every filter, and it is the only negation in the builder. Set the values you do not want, then turn the toggle on. There is no "is not" operator and no way to say "either this or that" inside one audience.
The two logic rules that catch people out
Filters within an audience use AND. A guest has to pass every filter to be included. Two filters, "booked at least 7 days ahead" and "at least one child", means both must be true. A booking made three months ahead with no children is out, and so is a booking with three children made six days ahead.
Audiences on a campaign use OR. Put two audiences on one journey and the message goes to everyone in either. The same two conditions, split across two audiences, now reach both of the bookings above rather than neither.
Same conditions, opposite results. If a campaign is reaching far more or far fewer guests than you expected, this is the first thing to check.
Start every audience with Reachable
Add the Reachable filter first, before anything else. It keeps only guests who have a usable email address or phone number, so you are not building a segment of people you cannot contact.
Checking reach on the campaign itself
The Reachable filter keeps unreachable guests out of an audience. The campaign's own Audience step then shows you how good that reach actually is, in three panels beside the picker: Audience match, All guests reach and Audience reach, the last two broken into Emails, Phones, Both and Any.
Comparing All guests reach against Audience reach is the sanity check worth doing before you publish. It tells you whether the audience you have picked is about as contactable as your database in general, or noticeably worse. The panels are the same on a Journey as on a Broadcast. See Selecting an audience before publishing a Broadcast for what each bar counts.
Which article covers which filter
The platform shows every filter in one list, so it is not obvious which are which. This index maps each one to the article that describes it, using the names exactly as the platform spells them.
Your list will not match this index exactly. Which filters the platform offers you depends on your account, on the integrations connected to it, and on the app selected on the audience. Some of the filters below may be missing, and others may appear that are not listed here. The app is the part you control: see The App selector on an audience.
Reachability: Reachable, Receiver Email Domains, Receiver Emails, Receiver Phones.
Guest and profile: Birthday, Count Of Future Reservations, Count Of Previous Reservations, Email Usernames, Form field value, Guest Gender, Guest Generations, Guest Has Company, Guest Has Submitted Form, Guest Has Task With Title, Guest Is In Hotel, Guest List, Guest Location, Guest profile info, Guest Stays Over At Hotel, Guest Total Spend, Guest Type, Loyalty Program Level, Missing profile info, User Has Consent.
Reservation: Channel Manager Name, Channel Segment, Days Booked Ahead, Estimated Time of Arrival, Guarantee Type, Guest Check-In Weekdays, Guest Check-Out Weekdays, Guest Checks In, Guest Checks Out, Market Segment, Number Of Guests, Number Of Nights, Ordered, Properties, Rate Plan, Rate Plan Code, Reservation Balance, Reservation Booked At, Reservation Debtor Is Company, Reservation has free space on checkout, Reservation Has Submitted Form, Reservation Linked to Company, Reservation Set, Reservation Status, Reservation Value, Reservation Value Per Day, Room types, Rooms, Time Booked Ahead.
Campaign behaviour: Opened Campaigns, Opened And Clicked Campaigns, Received Previous Campaigns.
A/B testing: AB testing.
Rooms, Room types and Ordered appear only when a specific property is selected in the App selector. Under All Apps (Limited Rules) they are not offered at all, and the four channel and market filters vary by app in both directions.
Two names changed in the platform and not in older articles. What some articles still call "Total spend" is Guest Total Spend, and what they call "A/B testing" is AB testing, with no slash. Searching the filter list for the old name finds nothing.
Do not use Reservation Stage (deprecated). The platform still offers it and labels it deprecated in the filter list itself. Use Reservation Status instead, and see Reservation statuses for what the status values mean and why they differ between screens.
Using one audience on both a Broadcast and a Journey
A saved audience can be used by both campaign types, which is how you reach guests who have already booked and the ones who book later. A Broadcast fixes its audience at the moment you publish; a Journey keeps sending to new matches.
What this does not do
An audience is only as good as your PMS data. A filter on a field your PMS does not send will match nobody, and it will look like a Bookboost problem rather than a data one.
A filter whose value picker is empty is not broken. It is telling you the data behind it has not reached Bookboost. An empty picker and a missing filter have different causes and different fixes.
The preview is not automatic. Nothing recalculates until you select Load Preview.
Filters cannot be combined with OR inside one audience. If you need "either of these", build two audiences and put both on the campaign.
An audience performs no consent check on its own. Being in an audience is not permission to market to someone. If you want to segment on consent deliberately, User Has Consent is the one filter that looks at it, and it is covered in Audience filters: guest and profile.
What to do next
Built one that nearly works? Copy it rather than editing it, so the original stays intact. See Duplicate an audience.
To find an audience you already have, see what campaigns depend on it, or recalculate its size without opening it, see The Audiences list screen.
Getting help
Open Help at the bottom of the left menu and choose Talk to Us, or email support@bookboost.io.