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Create and Set Attributes

Creating and setting Airship Attributes is now generally available. Use attributes to target users with precision, using complex expressions to evaluate audience inclusion.

Attributes are key-value pairs that you associate with your audience to help better target them with messages. Attributes extend the concept of tagsMetadata that you can associate with channels or Named Users for audience segmentation. Generally, they are descriptive terms indicating user preferences or other categorizations, e.g., wine_enthusiast or weather_alerts_los_angeles. Tags are case-sensitive. by adding comparison operators (e.g., equals, contains, greater/less than, etc.) and values to audience expressions, helping you better evaluate your audience.

You can use attributes to target audiences with greater specificity than you would with tags. See our Attributes beta launch announcement for a Tags vs Attributes example.

Using Attributes

Airship supplies and automatically assigns a set of default attributes for you. You can also define custom attributes. Custom attributes can be set on ChannelsAn instance representing an entity addressable via the Airship service, e.g., an iOS device, email address, SMS number or web browser. The channel instance or channel object contains all relevant information about a channel, including metadata used for targeting, opt-in status, device-specific information, and, importantly, a unique identifier for the channel, the Channel ID. and Named UsersA customer-provided identifier used for mapping multiple devices and channels to a specific individual.. Airship supports text, number (numeric and decimal), and date attribute types.

For TEXT and NUMBER attributes, you will target your audience using equals, contains, less, greater, and is_empty operators.

For DATE attributes, you will use before, after, equals, or range (indicating the target attribute should fall between two dates that you provide).

General Availability (GA)

With today’s release, these attribute features are available for all Airship customers:

Beta Features

Targeting your audience using attributes is in development as part of our beta program:

  • API:
    • You can target text, number, and date attributes.
    • Attributes can be combined with tags and audience lists.
  • Dashboard:
    • You can target text and number attributes only.
    • You can combine multiple attributes, but attributes cannot be combined with other data types, e.g., tags and audience lists.

Next Releases

Our next GA attribute features include setting attributes using CSV upload (and an SFTP upload option), and personalization. Our next beta feature is a new Segment Builder tool.

Documentation

Learn more in the Attributes feature guide.

  • Upgrade your SDKs — Required if you want to use default attributes or set custom attributes from the SDK
  • Define custom attributes in the dashboard
  • Set attributes on a channel or named user from the SDK or API

Then you can target audiences using attributes through the dashboard or the API:

API References: