In Adobe Experience Platform, you can configure expiration times for all Experience Events that are ingested into a dataset enabled for Real-Time Customer Profile. This lets you automatically remove data from the Profile store that is no longer valid or useful for your use cases.
Experience Event expirations cannot be configured through the Platform UI or APIs. Instead, you must contact support in order to enable Experience Event expirations on your required datasets.
Experience Event expirations are not to be confused with dataset expirations, which delete the entire dataset after the expiration date is reached. These are manually configured through Adobe Experience Platform Data Hygiene.
After Experience Event expirations have been enabled on a Profile-enabled dataset, Platform automatically applies the expiration values for each captured event in a two-step process:
Once applied, any data that is older than the number of days alloted by the expiration value is permanently deleted and cannot be restored.
For example, if you applied an expiration value of 30 days on May 15th, the following steps would occur:
You must ensure that the lookback windows for your audiences are within the expiration boundaries of their dependent datasets in order to keep results accurate. For example, if you apply an expiration value of 30 days and have an audience that tries to view data from up to 45 days ago, the resulting audience will likely be inaccurate.
You should therefore keep the same Experience Event expiration value for all datasets, if possible, to avoid the impact of different expiration values across different datasets in your segmentation logic.
The following section lists frequently asked questions regarding Experience Event data expiration:
Experience Event data expiry and Pseudonymous Profile data expiry are complementary features.
Experience Event data expiration works on a dataset level. As a result, each dataset can have a different data expiry setting.
Pseudonymous Profile data expiration works on a sandbox level. As a result, the data expiration will affect all profiles in the sandbox.
Experience Event data expiration removes events only based on the event record’s timestamp. The identity namespaces included are ignored for expiration purposes.
Pseudonymous Profile data expiration only considers profiles that have identity graphs which contain identity namespaces that were selected by the customer, such as ECID
, AAID
, or other types of cookies. If the profile contains any additional identity namespace that was not in the customer’s selected list, the profile will not be deleted.
Experience Event data expiration only removes events and does not remove profile class data. The profile class data is only removed when all the data is removed across all datasets and there are no profile class records remaining for the profile.
Pseudonymous Profile data expiration removes both event and profile records. As a result, the profile class data will also be removed.
Pseudonymous Profile data expiry and Experience Event data expiry can be used to complement each other.
You should always set up Experience Event data expiry in your datasets, based on your needs of retaining data about your known customers. Once Experience Event data expiry is set up, you can use Pseudonymous Profile data expiry to automatically remove Pseudonymous Profiles. Typically, the data expiry period for Pseudonymous Profiles is less than the data expiry period for Experience Events.
For a typical use case, you can set your Experience Event data expiry based on the values of your known user data and you can set your Pseudonymous Profile data expiry to a much shorter duration to limit the impact of Pseudonymous profiles on your Platform license compliance.