As you maintain your trait taxonomy you may find that you need to delete a trait that has become outdated. Audience Manager will not allow you to delete a trait if one of your subscribers is using it—specifically if one of your subscribers has that trait mapped in one of their segments. You will be able to tell that a trait is being used if you try to delete it and get an error message that says:
Unfortunately, there's no way for you to tell which subscribers are using the traits in Audience Manager. So, to delete a trait that's been mapped to customer segments do the following:
- Rename traits to include the term “DEPRECATED.”
- Submit a ticket to Zendesk with the following information:
- Product: AAM
- Ticket Type: Technical Support - AAM Marketplace Subscriber Information Request
- Ticket title: Can't delete trait—need subscriber list
- Ticket body (or attachment): a plain text list of all of the trait IDs that you are trying to delete—either comma-delimited or one ID per line.
- We will pull a list of customers who are actively using those traits and we'll send the list to you. The list will include the IDs of the segments that the traits are mapped to.
- Once you have the list, you can let your customers know that they should stop using these traits because they’re no longer supported. We can provide contact information for those customers if you don't have it.
- The customers will remove the traits from the segments.
- You can then delete the traits
Our partner team resources are limited so please consolidate the list of deletions that you would like to make into one request instead of spreading it out over multiple requests and do not request the list more than once a quarter.