Segment Membership Calculated Attribute

What Segment Membership gives you

Segment Membership is a system-defined Calculated Attribute that tags each user with the audiences they have joined or left. Because those tags sit on the customer profile, you can use them like any other attribute.

Build audiences from other audiences. Reference an existing audience’s members when defining a new one, without duplicating its logic.
Exclude users from a campaign. Suppress everyone already in another audience, even when that audience is not activated to a Destination.
Understand user behaviour. When running campaigns in platforms like Adobe, you may want to know which segments a user belongs to. Requesting Segment Membership in your Profile API call returns that list for a given user.
Drive Journeys. Use membership as an entry condition or re-entry criterion.

TerminologyThe terms Audiences and Segments are used interchangeably to refer to customer cohorts belonging to a specific category. An example of an audience/segment can be a specific group of customers who are over 18 years of age and have performed an addToCart event within the last 30 days.

When you need to Enable Membership

Any audience with an active refresh schedule contributes to Segment Membership. Whether you need to do anything depends on how that audience gets its schedule.

Your audience	What you need to do
Linked to a Destination	Nothing. It refreshes on the Destination’s schedule, so its users are tagged automatically.
Not linked to a Destination	Enable Membership. Without a Destination the audience would not refresh, so it needs a schedule of its own.

Enable Membership is not a switch that turns tagging on. Tagging follows the refresh schedule. Enable Membership gives a destination-less audience a refresh schedule so that tagging happens at all. This is the main reason the feature exists.

Before you begin

Segment Membership must be provisioned for your organisation

Go to Unify → Calculated Attributes and look for Segment Membership in the Batch Attributes list. Its Created By value will be System.

If it is not listed, it has not been provisioned for your organisation. Contact your Zeotap POC.

Check the refresh schedule of any audience you plan to reference

An audience only contributes membership data while it is actively refreshing. If an audience has neither a Destination nor membership enabled, or its schedule has become inactive, it contributes nothing even though the audience itself still opens normally.

Enable membership on an audience

On a new audience

Build and save your audience

Define your audience criteria as normal, then select Save.

Choose Enable Membership

On saving, you are asked how you would like to proceed.

Enable Membership gives the audience its own refresh schedule, so its users are tagged. Use this when the audience is not going to a Destination.
Activate Now sends the audience to a Destination immediately. It will refresh on the Destination’s schedule, so its users are tagged without enabling membership.
Activate Later saves the audience without activating it. It has no refresh schedule yet, so it contributes no membership data until it gets one.

On an existing audience

Membership is calculated for all audiences by default, so there is nothing to switch on for an audience you have already saved.

Use Segment Membership in Audiences

Add a calculated attribute condition

In the audience builder, under Let’s define the Audience criteria, set Customers who have to calculated attributes.

Select the attribute and operator

Choose Segment Membership as the attribute, then Contains Any as the operator.

Select the audience IDs

Choose one or more audience IDs from the dropdown. The list is searchable and supports high-cardinality values.

Check your estimate

Select Check Estimates to confirm the condition returns the population you expect before saving.

What Contains Any matchesContains Any checks only whether a user is part of the referenced audience. It does not re-run that audience’s own filters.

Worked example: excluding an audience that has no Destination

Say you want to exclude the members of an existing audience from a new campaign, but that audience is not activated to any Destination. Because it has no Destination, it has no refresh schedule, so it is not contributing membership data and referencing it would return nothing.

Open the audience you want to exclude and select Enable Membership. It now has a refresh schedule, and its members start being tagged.
Wait for one refresh to complete.
In your new audience, add a Segment Membership condition referencing that audience ID, and negate it so those users are excluded.
Select Check Estimates to confirm the exclusion has taken effect.

Retrieve Segment Membership via the Profile API

Request segment_membership inside the calc_attributes object of your fetch block. The Profile API requires mTLS, so supply your client certificate and key:

curl -X POST 'https://mtls-api.zeotap.com/cdp/v1/users/_search' \
  --cert /path/to/client.crt \
  --key  /path/to/client.key \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{
    "orgId": <YOUR_ORG_ID>,
    "regions": ["<YOUR_REGION>"],
    "search": {
      "cellphone_number_withoutcode_sha256": ["<HASHED_IDENTIFIER>"]
    },
    "fetch": {
      "calc_attributes": ["segment_membership"]
    }
  }'

The response returns the user’s audience IDs as an array:

{
  "ucid": "<UCID>",
  "calc_attributes": {
    "segment_membership": ["102228", "104732", "103515"]
  }
}

The response returns audience IDs only. There is no mapping to business-readable audience names.

Value type differs by contextsegment_membership is stored on the profile as an integer array, but serialises as a string array in JSON payloads, file exports, and the Journey engine.When writing rules that compare against this attribute, whether Journey conditions, deletion rules or downstream filters, make sure your operand type matches the context you are evaluating in. A mismatched operand type will silently match zero users rather than raising an error.

For full endpoint and authentication details, see the Profile API reference.

Refresh cadence

Segment Membership is recomputed when the contributing audiences refresh, so membership runs roughly 24 hours behind. The Last Successful Refresh and Next Refresh Date columns on the Calculated Attributes screen show the last completed run and the next scheduled start. For general Calculated Attribute refresh timing and latency, see Calculated Attributes: Guardrails & Limits.

Troubleshooting

Segment Membership is empty for a user I expect to be in an audience

Work through these in order:

Does the audience have an active refresh schedule? It needs one either from a Destination or from Enable Membership. Without a schedule the audience contributes nothing. This is the most common cause.
Has a refresh completed since the user qualified? Check Last Successful Refresh on the Calculated Attributes screen. Newly ingested profiles do not appear until a refresh cycle covering them has completed.
Has the schedule become inactive? A schedule can stop running without an obvious signal, including on audiences that are linked to a Destination.
Has the user requalified recently? Membership is designed to lapse if a user does not requalify within 30 days.

If all four check out and membership is still empty, raise a support ticket with the organisation, audience ID, and an affected UCID.

An audience referencing another audience returns 0 users

Usually because the referenced audience has no active refresh schedule, either because it has no Destination and membership was never enabled, or because its schedule has stopped. Open the referenced audience, confirm it is refreshing, and wait for one cycle to complete before re-checking your estimate.A referenced audience showing a healthy count when opened directly does not tell you whether its membership data is populated. These are computed separately.

Combining several membership conditions returns 0 users

Conditions that each return results individually can return zero when combined. If you hit this, raise a support ticket with the audience IDs and the combinations you have tried, rather than assuming the logic is wrong.

The Next Refresh Date appears to have already passed

Next Refresh Date shows the scheduled start time of the batch run, not the time fresh data becomes available. A run can take some hours to complete, so the displayed timestamp can sit in the past while the run is still in progress.Known limitations of this display: there is no run-state indicator distinguishing scheduled, in-progress and completed, and the time is shown without an AM/PM marker or timezone. A past-dated timestamp does not by itself mean the refresh has failed.

Users still show membership of an audience they no longer qualify for

After changing audience criteria, allow at least one full refresh cycle for membership to be recomputed.If stale membership persists well beyond that, raise a support ticket and include the audience ID, the organisation, and the expected versus actual counts. Do not rely on the attribute for suppression or Journey targeting until it is confirmed accurate.

Segment ID search does not work in Customer 360

Searching for a segment ID under Customer 360 → Traits → Calculated Attributes is a known issue. Verify membership through the Profile API or the audience builder estimate instead.

Segment Membership Calculated Attribute

What Segment Membership gives you

When you need to Enable Membership

Before you begin

Enable membership on an audience

On a new audience

On an existing audience

Use Segment Membership in Audiences

Worked example: excluding an audience that has no Destination

Retrieve Segment Membership via the Profile API

Refresh cadence

Troubleshooting

Calculated Attributes

How Calculated Attributes Work

Enable Membership

Journeys: Add an Entry Condition

Journeys: Add Re-entry Criteria

Profile API

​What Segment Membership gives you

​When you need to Enable Membership

​Before you begin

​Enable membership on an audience

​On a new audience

​On an existing audience

​Use Segment Membership in Audiences

​Worked example: excluding an audience that has no Destination

​Retrieve Segment Membership via the Profile API

​Refresh cadence

​Troubleshooting

​Related Topics

Calculated Attributes

How Calculated Attributes Work

Enable Membership

Journeys: Add an Entry Condition

Journeys: Add Re-entry Criteria

Profile API

What Segment Membership gives you

When you need to Enable Membership

Before you begin

Enable membership on an audience

On a new audience

On an existing audience

Use Segment Membership in Audiences

Worked example: excluding an audience that has no Destination

Retrieve Segment Membership via the Profile API

Refresh cadence

Troubleshooting

Related Topics