Segmentation Setup - Cloud Best Practice

[jan_kaemmerle]

Hello Colleagues,

currently my customer is working with SAP Marketing On-Premise 1809. There we did setup our own custom segmentation.
This includes

• Z-Views/Data Sources
• Z-Segmentation Object
• Z-Attribute Groups
• Z-Segmentation Profiles

Now we are switching to SAP Marketing Cloud 1902.
On the one hand side this is a great opportunity to go back to standard, so using standard Segmentation Profiles/Objects. On the other hand the customer is used to his own attribute groups, so structure of the segmentation, logics, etc.

What I'm currently struggeling with is to what depth we should use custom functionality vs standard.
And in addition, if we use standard, in which detail we can/should adopt it. Especially in regards to upcoming releases (customizing-comparison).
Below a few examples what we try to achieve:
- Enable/disable attributes
- Renaming attributes
- Changing the assignment of attributes to attribute groups
- Use additional custom attribute groups
- Use additional custom data sources
- etc.
- Problem is that we can not predict what requirement will come in future that we have to cover… 🙂

So should I now create right away a custom segmentation object? Or try using the standard segmentation object and adopt it? In what detail can I adopt it? What happens in case of a new release, are my changes overwritten or do I have to do with each upgrade a customizing comparison? Etc.

Hope it's more or less clear where my problems are laying.

Best regards & thanks,
Jan

[vervinckt_joyca]

Hi Jan!

I struggled with the same questions the first time I went from onprem to a cloud project.

Thanks Sebastian for your excellent explanation and the technical details behind it, I knew upgrades weren't affecting the changes I made to the standard objects, but I didn't know why 😛

I usually do create custom Segmentation Profiles, but based on standard Segmentation Objects. As often, we need a profile per Marketing Area so with a filter. (so as Sebastian said if you need to differentiate the population).

PS: the Z-(HANA)-views are the most difficult ones, as you can't model in your actual HANA database directly, you need to model in a separate instance (without your actual data)... But there's a nice blog from Maik Offerle about this: https://blogs.sap.com/2018/12/17/how-to-model-custom-sap-hana-views-for-sap-marketing-cloud-in-your-... / https://www.sap.com/cxworks/article/453913143/How_to_Model_Custom_SAP_HANA_Views_for_SAP_Marketing_C...

Kr,

Joyca