# Audience

Your audience is every contact in a project, described by attributes and activity events, queried through segments, and grouped with lists and tags. This page explains how those pieces fit together, how contacts stay unified, and where each one is managed.

**Language:** en
**Audience:** platform
**TLDR:** A project has one audience: every contact it holds, populated by data sources and kept current as new data arrives. Segments query that audience, profiles show each contact's record, and attributes and events describe them.
**Translation key:** platform.audience.overview
**Search keywords:** audience, contact, contacts, profile, profiles, segment, segments, dynamic segment, static segment, list, lists, tag, tags, attribute, attributes, event, events, activity, filter, customer data, data model, deduplication, merge, unification, unique attribute
**Related pages:** /platform/es/audience, /platform/en/audience/contacts-profiles, /platform/en/audience/audience-table, /platform/en/audience/segments, /platform/en/audience/attributes-events, /platform/en/consent
**Docs index (every page):** https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt
**This zone's index:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/llms.txt
**This page:** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/audience/ (HTML) · https://docs.instasent.com/platform/en/audience.md (Markdown)
**Other language (es):** https://docs.instasent.com/platform/es/audience.md

Your **audience** is everyone you can reach in a project: each person is a **contact**,
described by **attributes** (the data you know about them) and **activity events** (the
things they do), grouped on demand through **segments**, and labelled with **lists** and
**tags**. You'll find all of it under **Audience** in the dashboard, where the menu is split
into **Contacts**, **Segments**, **Data sources** and **Activity**.

## How the pieces fit together

- **Contacts** are the people. Each one has a profile with their attributes, their activity
  timeline, their commercial insights and their subscription status per channel. Browse them
  in the [audience table](/platform/en/audience/audience-table), open one to see its
  [profile](/platform/en/audience/contacts-profiles).
- **Attributes** are the fields on a contact — name, phone, country, plus any custom or
  e-commerce fields your data brings in. Each has a **data type** that decides how it behaves
  in filters. You'll find them in [Attributes & events](/platform/en/audience/attributes-events).
- **Activity events** are timestamped actions — a placed order, a campaign click, an
  abandoned checkout — that build the contact's timeline and can be filtered on when you
  segment. Events are read-only; you don't type them in by hand.
- **Segments** are saved queries over attributes, activity and other segments. They stay up
  to date on their own and are what you target a campaign or automation at. Build them in
  [Segments](/platform/en/audience/segments).
- **Lists** and **tags** are simpler labels for a fixed set of contacts that doesn't change
  on its own — covered alongside segments.

Contacts arrive from your [data sources](/platform/en/data-sources) — a CSV import, a
connector like Shopify, or the API — and Instasent unifies duplicates as they come in (see
[one contact per person](#one-contact-per-person) below).

## Where to go next

- [Contacts](/platform/en/audience/contacts-profiles) - The contact profile: attributes, activity timeline, commercial insights, subscription status, tags and segments, and what you can edit.
- [Audience table](/platform/en/audience/audience-table) - Browse every contact, choose your columns, switch saved views, search, filter and run bulk actions.
- [Segments](/platform/en/audience/segments) - Build dynamic segments from attribute, activity and segment conditions, combined with AND/OR.
- [Attributes & events](/platform/en/audience/attributes-events) - The project's data schema: system and custom attributes, their data types, and the events that feed activity.

## One contact per person

A contact's identity is anchored on a **unique attribute** — by default the mobile phone or
the email. When new data arrives with the same value in a unique attribute, Instasent
**merges it into the existing contact automatically** instead of creating a duplicate, so a
person who reaches you through several sources stays a single profile.

Two rules to keep in mind:

- **Empty values are never merged** — a missing phone or email won't pull unrelated contacts
  together.
- **Merging is automatic.** It happens as data flows in (and when you mark an attribute as
  unique). There is no "merge two contacts" button in the dashboard; unification is a
  background behaviour, not a manual action.

How an attribute is marked unique — and what happens to existing contacts when you do — is
covered in [Attributes & events](/platform/en/audience/attributes-events#unique-attributes-and-automatic-merging).

## Subscription status shows here, the model is in Consent

Each contact profile shows whether they can be messaged on each channel under **Channel
preferences**, and you can edit it by hand. The *rules* behind that — marketing preference
versus suppression, opt-outs, and how a STOP propagates across channels — are explained once
in [Consent](/platform/en/consent), the owner of the subscription model. The audience pages
link to it wherever subscription state shows up.

Ready to look at a contact? Start with [Contacts](/platform/en/audience/contacts-profiles).

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This is one page of the Instasent documentation. For the complete machine-readable index of every guide and API reference, fetch https://docs.instasent.com/llms.txt — start there for full context.