Objective
When syncing a Segment Engage Audience to a destination, you might notice that the number of delivered events is higher than the number of users in your audience, which can appear as duplicate events on the delivery list. This article explains why an audience delivery might trigger multiple events for a single user and outlines the steps to identify the source of these additional events.
Product
Twilio Segment
Environment
Segment Console
Procedure
If your downstream destination is receiving more events than the total number of users in your audience, your data is likely not duplicating. Instead, this is expected behavior based on how Segment Engage handles identity resolution and ensures destinations get complete profiles.
To understand where these extra events are coming from, you can review the following areas:
- The Baseline Rule (One Event Per Identifier): By default, Engage sends one event for every identifier attached to a user's profile rather than one event per user. For example, if a single user has both a user_id and an email address, Engage generates two separate events. This ensures your downstream destination has all the necessary keys to accurately match the user.
- Anonymous User Settings: Open your audience in the Segment workspace and check your configuration. If the "include anonymous users" flag is enabled, Segment sends an event for every anonymousId on the user's profile. Since users frequently collect multiple anonymous IDs (by using different devices, browsing in incognito windows, or clearing cookies), this setting will drastically increase your total event count.
- Multiple Identifiers of the Same Type: Check if the users in your audience have multiple identifiers of the same type saved to their profile. For instance, if a user has provided two different email addresses over time, Engage will trigger a separate event for both of them.
- New Identifier Additions: If a new identifier (like an external_id) was recently added to a user's profile, it can trigger multiple audience events to account for the new data.
- Recent Profile Merges: When two profiles merge into one via identity resolution, it will also cause multiple audience events to trigger so the destination is updated with the newly combined identifiers.
Additional Information
Different destinations may require different keys so they can do their own matching and identification. By sending events for all permutations of default identifiers, Engage ensures that payloads automatically enrich downstream tools with the required keys.
You can find more information in the following documentation: