BlueKai: SFTP Export

Exporting user profiles and audience membership to BlueKai allows you to use behavioral data, content affinities, and insights from Lytics for better ad targeting. Export your audiences to SFTP to stage your files in a compressed, tab-separated value (TSV) format before importing into BlueKai.

• Implementation Type: Server-side.
• Implementation Technique: File based transfer.
• Frequency: Batch with backfill, frequency can be configured.
• Resulting data: User profiles and audience membership.

This workflow uploads two files in the selected SFTP server: Offline file and Trigger file. In short, the Offline file contains all the exported data about the user, and the Trigger file contains meta information about the Offline file.

We follow BlueKai's documentation in creating the Offline file. Data is exported in TSV format with two columns and no header row. Each line in the Offline file represents a unique user. The first column contains the identifier for the user whereas the second column contains the user profile fields that are separated by a pipe "|". An example of an entry in exported file is given below:

some_unique_id       field1=value|field2=value|field3=value*

The Offline file follows the Partner_SiteID_YYYY-MM-DD.gz naming conventions. Lytics collects Partner name and Site ID during the authorization step.

The Trigger file contains the information about the exported Offline file such as file name, size in bytes and MD5 checksum. This file is used for verification purposes so that all the user data is transferred without any corruption. The Trigger file is created and uploaded only after the Offline file is uploaded. The Trigger file follows the Partner_SiteID_YYYY-MM-DD.gz.trigger naming convention.

Once the job is started, it will:

1. Connect to the SFTP server.
2. Navigate to the configured folder in the SFTP server.
3. Create a compressed TSV file in the SFTP server.
4. Scan the audience and process users into TSV lines with two columns.
5. Write TSV lines to the file.
6. Close the completed file.
7. Create the Trigger file and disconnect from the SFTP server.
8. Schedule the next run.
9. BlueKai imports the file for processing. See BlueKai's documentation for more details on setting up BlueKai to import the file.

Fields that are exported for this integration are entirely defined by the Fields to Export step in the configuration.

Follow these steps to set up and configure an export job for BlueKai in the Lytics platform. If you are new to creating jobs in Lytics, see the Jobs Dashboard documentation for more information.

1. Select BlueKai from the list of providers.
2. Select the Export Audiences job type from the list.
3. Select the Authorization you would like to use or create a new one.
4. Enter a Label to identify this job you are creating in Lytics.
5. (Optional) Enter a Description for further context on your job.
6. From the Audiences input, select the audience(s) that contains the users to export.

7. (optional) From the Identifier input, select the field that will be placed in the first column of the file. This field should be a unique identifier and be selected in the Fields to export.

8. (optional) From the Audience membership input, select the audiences to include in the audience membership. If left blank, all audiences will be included.

9. (optional) Select the Append Segment Name checkbox to add a field with the audience name.
10. (optional) Select the Additional Segments checkbox to add a column containing all the audiences a user is a member of.

11. (optional) From the Fields to Export input, select the user fields to export.

12. (optional) From the Custom Join input, enter a custom join character for fields that have multiple values. The default is "&". E.g. [email protected]&[email protected].

13. (optional) Select the Continuous Export checkbox to export the audience repeatedly.
14. (optional) From the File Export Frequency input, select how often a continuous export should create a new file.
15. (optional) From the Time of Day input, select the time of day to start the export each day. This applies to daily, weekly, and monthly frequencies only.
16. (optional) From the Timezone input, select the timezone for the time of day.
17. Click Start Export.