Audiences

Clay Audiences is the unified data layer for your workspace. It combines your CRM, data warehouse, and third-party enrichments into one persistent profile per contact and account, updated in real time.
Use it to build dynamic segments across millions of records, run automated enrichment and signal workflows at scale, and sync results back to your CRM without managing dozens of separate tables.

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Setting up Audiences follows four steps:

1. Import your data — connect Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, BigQuery, or import from CSV or Clay's people and companies database.
2. Create audiences — build dynamic segments using filters to target the right contacts and accounts.
3. Enrich and monitor — run bulk enrichments and signals that write data permanently back to each record.
4. Write back to your CRM — sync enriched data and segment membership back to Salesforce or HubSpot.

Navigating Audiences

Audiences has two main views for managing your data and segments.

The Audiences page is the home for all your segments. It replaces hunting through the sidebar list.

• Three tabs: segments you created, segments others in your workspace created, and Drafts.
• Each row shows record count, creator, and inline actions to add an enrichment or automation.
• Create new audiences directly from this page.
• Click into any audience to open the table view, where Enrich and Send are available.

The Data Hub is the control center for the data inside your audiences. It has four tabs:

• Overview — record, field, enrichment, and signal counts with quick-add shortcuts.
• Fields — a list of all fields with fill-rate indicators. Click any field for a side panel showing fill rate, total records covered, source (Salesforce vs. enriched in Clay), cost, type, field description, export status, and associated enrichments.
• Enrichments — a central list of every enrichment across your audiences, showing cost vs. budget, run status, and which audiences and fields each enrichment covers. From here you can point a single enrichment at multiple audiences at once.
• Signals — the same layout as Enrichments. Add a signal and assign it to multiple audiences from one place.

Importing your data

To add a data source, click Add Data from any view in Audiences. This routes to Settings → Sources / Destinations.

You can import data from:

• Salesforce
• HubSpot
• Snowflake
• BigQuery
• CSV
• Clay's people and companies database

Importing from Salesforce

1. Click Add data → Add Source → select your Salesforce integration.
   • If you don't see a Salesforce integration listed, contact your Growth Strategist.
2. You'll see four tabs at the top: Accounts, Contacts, Leads, and Opportunities. Start with Accounts.
3. Under Import data from Accounts, enable Import sync to continuously pull Accounts data into Clay Audiences. Imports run incrementally every 15 minutes, with a full sync once a week.
4. (Optional) Enable Import activities to also import tasks and events associated with your accounts.
5. (Optional) Click Edit next to Import record matching to combine account records from multiple sources. See Configuring import record matching for setup details.
6. Under Export Accounts data, leave Export sync and Create new Salesforce records off for now.
7. Under Accounts field mapping, map Clay Companies fields to Salesforce Account fields.
   • Use Auto-map to automatically match fields, or configure each mapping manually.
   • The Scheduled export rule column controls whether Clay writes each field back to Salesforce. The default is Never write — Clay enriches the field in your Audience but won't push it to Salesforce until you update the rule.
   • Click Preview to review your mapping before saving.
8. Click the Contacts tab. Under Import data from Contacts, enable Import sync.
9. (Optional) Click Edit next to Import record matching to combine contact records from multiple sources.
10. Under Export Contacts data, leave Export sync and Create new Salesforce records off for now.
11. Under Contacts field mapping, map Clay People fields to Salesforce Contact fields. Add any fields you frequently use or want to segment by.
12. Click the Leads tab. Under Import data from Leads, enable Import sync.
13. Under Leads field mapping, add any Lead fields you want to filter or segment by — common fields include Lead Status, Lead Source, Title, and Company.
    • Automatic Lead-to-Contact merging: When a Salesforce Lead is converted into a Contact in Salesforce, Clay automatically merges the Lead and Contact records into a single person record in your Audiences. This happens under the hood and is not user-configurable — data from both the Lead and Contact is combined and preserved.
    • Cross-source matching: Lead records are also deduplicated against Contact records from other sources using LinkedIn URL and email. See Configuring import record matching for details.
    • Duplicates across Salesforce Leads, Contacts, and other sources count as one person in your Audiences.
14. Click the Opportunities tab. Under Import data from Opportunities, enable Import sync.
15. Under Opportunities field mapping, add any Opportunity fields you want to filter or segment by — common fields include Stage, Amount, Close Date, and Owner.
    • Opportunity data is associated with your Companies records and becomes available as a filter in your Companies audience.
16. Click Save and review, then Confirm.

Why the native connection matters: Standard Clay table imports run full API calls on every sync. The Audiences connection uses incremental syncs — only changed records are processed after the initial import — which means far fewer API calls. If your Salesforce admin has raised API limit concerns, this is the fix.

Importing from HubSpot

1. Click Add data → Add Source → select your HubSpot integration.
   • If you don't see a HubSpot integration listed, contact your Growth Strategist.
2. Select People at the top of the sync panel.
3. Enable the Import toggle.
4. Add any HubSpot Contact fields you frequently use or want to segment by.
5. Name the corresponding Clay fields.
6. Select Companies at the top and repeat for accounts.
7. Select Deals at the top of the sync panel.
8. Enable the Import toggle.
9. Add any Deal fields you want to filter or segment by — common fields include Deal Stage, Amount, Close Date, Deal Owner, and Deal Type.
   • Deal data is associated with your Companies records and becomes available as a filter in your Companies audience.
10. Name the corresponding Clay fields.
11. Click Save and review, then Confirm.

Scheduled export rule — each field in the field mapping has a Scheduled export rule that controls whether Clay writes that field's value back to HubSpot. The default is Never write, which means Clay enriches the field in your Audience but won't push it to HubSpot until you update the rule. We recommend leaving fields on Never write until you've validated Clay's data quality, to avoid overwriting actively maintained CRM data.

Importing from Snowflake

1. Click Add data → Import from Snowflake.
2. Pick a database → schema → warehouse, then write a SQL query directly. Click Test to preview results before continuing.
3. Confirm the preview looks correct, then click Continue.
4. Define the Unique Identifier:
   • For People: email or user_id.
   • For Companies: company_id or domain.
5. (Optional) Configure a Timestamp Field for incremental syncing:
   • With a timestamp: syncs run every 15 minutes and only import new or changed records.
   • Without a timestamp: the full query reruns every 12 hours.
6. Map your Snowflake columns to Audience fields.
7. Review and click Confirm — Clay begins importing immediately.
8. Monitor the import. If records don't appear immediately, refresh the page to see the latest count.

Importing from BigQuery

BigQuery is available as a native Audiences import source. The setup follows the same pattern as Snowflake: select your database, schema, and warehouse, then query directly with SQL. Results appear as Audiences data you can map in.

Importing from CSV

1. Click Add data → Add Source → CSV.
2. Name the source and upload your file.
3. Preview the data to confirm it looks correct.
4. Click Confirm — records begin importing immediately.

Importing from people and companies search

1. Click Add data → Find people or Find companies to open a search.
2. Narrow your search using parameters like Job title, Experience, and Technographics (for Find Companies).
3. Click Continue → Save to People/Companies.
   • This sends your search results to a draft — it won't combine them with your existing Audience data until you commit.
4. In your draft, click Enrich to bulk enrich and refine your data, keeping only high-quality leads.
5. When your search data looks good, click All people to merge.

Sending data from Clay table

You can also send contacts from any existing Clay table directly to your Audience:

1. Open any table with contacts you want to save to your Audience.
2. Click Continue at the bottom of the table.
3. Select Save to People or Save to Companies depending on the record type.

Records saved from tables are automatically deduplicated and merged with your existing audience data.

Configuring import record matching

When you import a new data source into Audiences — for example, a Snowflake table after already importing from Salesforce — import record matching lets Clay combine records from multiple sources when they represent the same person or company. It works by checking whether a specific alias field (such as email, LinkedIn URL, or domain) matches across sources, and merging the records if it does.

Import record matching is optional and configured per object, directly within the import settings for each source.

To configure import record matching:

1. In the import settings panel for any object, find Import record matching and click Edit.
2. Choose the alias field to match on — for example:
   • Email — for people records
   • Domain — for company records
   • LinkedIn URL — for people records
3. Save your settings. Clay will now match incoming records against existing ones on that field, merging them into a single record rather than creating a duplicate.

Creating an audience

After importing, create audiences to target the right contacts for each use case.

1. Click People or Companies in the left sidebar.
2. Click the + next to My Audiences.
3. Select Criteria and then add a Filter or Filter group.

You can filter on three data types simultaneously using AND/OR logic:

• CRM fields (mapped on import) — owner, deal stage, lead status, account type, custom fields.
• Clay enrichment data — firmographics, work email, phone, tech stack.
• Clay signals — job changes, funding, hiring spikes.

New audience-building features:

• AI filters — type your filter condition in plain language (e.g., "employee count less than 500") and Clay builds the filter automatically. AI can create individual filter conditions but not filter groups.
• Filter groups — combine multiple filter conditions with independent AND/OR operators. Each group has its own set of conditions and its own AND/OR toggle, and groups can be layered for complex segmentation logic.
• Record detail view — click into any record to step through your audience one record at a time and see which fields are filled vs. empty. A cleaner alternative to reading the full grid.
• Archive records — move records out of your active audience without deleting them. Archived records can be browsed and restored at any time. Useful for cleaning up a segment without losing historical data.

Enriching and monitoring

Adding enrichments

Bulk enrichments add contact data, firmographics, technographics, and more to your audience records at scale. They run on an audience and write results permanently back to All People — not just the segment you ran them from. This means any enriched field is immediately available as a filter in any other segment.

To add an enrichment:

1. Navigate to an audience and click Enrich → Add bulk enrich.
2. Add enrichment columns as you normally would (e.g., Enrich Person for LinkedIn URL, title, phone).
3. Select which audiences this enrichment should apply to. You can assign one enrichment to multiple audiences at once.
4. (Optional) Set a credit budget — configure a table-level credit cap before running. You can increase the cap incrementally as you validate output.
5. Test on a small batch first — click Run on 10 rows to verify output before running at scale.
6. Configure Field mapping to determine what writes back to Audiences.
   • Field mapping is enabled by default. Configure it to persist enriched results to your audience records — you can create a new Audience field on the spot during mapping if one doesn't exist.
   • You can disable field mapping if you want to use the enrichment to trigger an action (e.g., enroll in a sequencer) without writing data back to Audiences.
7. (Optional) Enable the Continuous Enrichment toggle so new records entering this segment are automatically enriched — typically within 15 minutes.
8. Click Start Run.

Editing an enrichment after creation: Click an enrichment in the Data Hub sidebar to open the read-only side panel, which shows its status and configuration summary. To change any settings, click Edit enrichment to open the full Bulk Enrich settings page.

Send to Table row cap: If your bulk enrichment's Send table data column targets a table with more than 50,000 rows, you'll see a warning. Enterprise customers can resolve this by enabling auto-deletion (see auto-delete docs) or adding an output column. Non-Enterprise customers should add an output column.

Additional enrichment options:

• Quality gates — set a threshold per audience that records must meet to proceed (e.g., "only continue if a valid work email was found"). Records that don't pass the threshold stay in the audience but don't trigger downstream actions.
• Scheduled runs — configure enrichments to run on a daily, monthly, or custom schedule for ongoing maintenance use cases.
• Archived runs — open any enrichment and click Archived Run to view and export data from previous enrichment runs. Useful for audit trails and recovering past output.

Using Audiences from a Clay table:

Two Clay enrichments let you move data between a Clay table and your Audience directly.

• In any Clay table, click Add enrichment and search for:
• Upsert Audiences Record — pushes records from a table into your Audience, creating a new record or merging with an existing one. Use this to commit data from unsupported integrations, or to send a processed table's contacts into your Audience after an outreach workflow.
• Lookup Audiences Record — retrieves enrichment data stored in your Audience and pulls it into the table. Use it to reference enriched or signal data in a table workflow without making Salesforce API calls.

Signals

Signals monitor your audience for key changes and write results permanently to each matching record so you can segment on them.

To add a signal to a segment:

1. Navigate to an audience and click Enrich.
2. Click Signals → select a signal type (e.g., Job Change).
3. Set the look-back period for the initial run: 3 months, 6 months, or 1 year.
4. Set the recurrence frequency — how often it re-runs going forward.
5. Review the cost preview per record shown before the run begins.
6. Click Save and Run.

After you add a signal:

• Results write to a dedicated signal column on each matching record — stored permanently and globally (not scoped to this segment).
• Clay automatically creates a companion segment combining your original filters plus a filter for the new signal result — this is expected, not an error.
• Multiple signals each get their own column; the Signal Summary column aggregates all results. Click any row to see per-signal detail.
• Any other segment that filters on this signal type will also surface these results.
• Signals are also managed centrally in Data Hub → Signals; a single signal can apply to multiple audiences at once.

Sending from Audiences

When you have a segment ready, click Send → Create ad sync to push it to an ad platform.

Account-based advertising: sync contact or company segments to LinkedIn, Meta, or Google Ads. Contacts and accounts who no longer qualify are automatically removed from the synced ad audience. See Clay Ads for setup and platform-specific guidance.

For outbound sequencer and other non-ad workflows: use Bulk Enrich with a sequencer action column, or use Upsert Audiences Record to commit qualifying contacts to a Clay table and then enroll them from there.

Writing back to your CRM

Audiences supports bidirectional sync with Salesforce and HubSpot. Enriched data and segment changes write back automatically.

Map any Clay data or segment membership to CRM fields using the field mapping panel in Settings → Sources / Destinations. Examples:

• Personal email → Salesforce Personal Email field.
• Segment membership → CRM status, campaign enrollment, lead score, or owner assignment.

Scheduled export rule — each mapped field has a Scheduled export rule that controls whether and how Clay writes that field's value back to your CRM. The default is Never write. Update the rule for any field you want Clay to write back automatically.

Create new Salesforce records — when enabled, Clay creates new records in Salesforce for contacts that don't already exist there. When off, Clay only updates existing records.

Export sync behavior:

• Exports run every 24 hours.
• The first export brings everything over; subsequent syncs are incremental — only changed records are processed.

Salesforce API usage

Audiences uses Salesforce's Bulk API 2.0 for both import and export operations. This is separate from your standard REST API limits.

• Import: Uses ~50,000 records per API call. For a 5M-record CRM, this translates to approximately 100 Bulk API calls.
• Export: Uses ~10,000 records per batch. Initial exports consume more API calls, but subsequent incremental syncs only process changed records.

Checking your API limits: Navigate to Setup → System Overview → API Usage in Salesforce to view your remaining Bulk API requests. Most Enterprise Salesforce orgs have limits around 150 million records per day, making API usage a non-issue for the majority of customers.