Forum Discussion
Segmenting on a custom location field
Hi all, I've currently got a use case where I want to target a Braze canvas at customers who have previously ordered within a given radius of a specific location. We don't use Braze's SDK based locat...
Malcolm_Murray - as it looks like you've already found setting the current location manually would work - although having a location type for custom attributes would be really helpful.
How is that radius going to change as you use it? Per user? How deterministic is it? or not at all?
Sounds like a fun project though. Would be happy to have a look at it if you could use extra eyes/brains.
The radius will change per canvas run. Basically for each run of the canvas I want to segment on users who have last ordered from a given point which is inside a radius from another point. So, although I can now set a location field for users, I can't figure out how to use this in a dynamic way.
I use connected audience filters via the API to handle dynamic segmentation. Connected audience filters seem to cover most data type and allow us to create filters on most of the data types handled by Braze.. except for location. Braze must be able to do this behind the scenes, but the question is how do we do this dynamically?
I can now do it via the UI. But that would mean (for us) creating a new canvas every time we want to send to customers for a different central point. This needs to be dynamic for us as it's going to be triggered in an automated way daily with different criteria.
100% agree that you shouldn't have a new canvas every time.
Speculation:
I'm still wondering if there's another way of thinking about this. I don't know what the underlying requirement is, but I'd be wondering if I could turn the problem on it's head and turn this into a personalisation challenge instead - and maybe thinking closer to realtime than a daily batch.
So you'd send to 'all' (obviously not all, you'd likely want to rate limit) users that have done a thing at location X which is within Y distance of location Z - for all values of X and Z rather than just one at a time.
Though, I guess you still need to calculate Y and depending on how many location Z's you have, that's perhaps not trivial to do on the fly.
You could use a connected content call to an API endpoint to determine distance, but it would be good to not have to do that for lots of Zs.
(still speculating)
How many locations do you have? Could you pre-calculate all the distances?
I'm also wondering if you could contain some of this 'pre' logic in a campaign that then triggers the canvas using a webhook with the variables it needs populated.
(end speculation for now)
