Audiences Customer Studio

Operator builds a Customer Studio Parent Model on top of the warehouse but picks an unstable session_id as the identity column instead of customer_id.

Parent Model identity column must be stable across sessions (customer_id, user_uuid). Per Customer Studio docs, every audience traits + related-events join through this identity — instability fragments users and breaks audience membership. Use identity resolution to merge known aliases.

Audience filters users where churn_risk_score >= 0.8. The trait is updated daily by dbt; the audience is refreshed hourly. Operators think the audience reflects today's data when it reflects yesterday's.

Document the trait's source-of-truth freshness in the trait description; set the audience refresh cadence to the trait cadence (or chain via dbt Cloud trigger). Surface the trait's as_of timestamp in the audience UI so analysts see actual recency.

An analyst creates a trait 'predicted_ltv' using a notebook computation but doesn't materialize it in the warehouse. Customer Studio can't reference it.

Every trait must come from a warehouse column (raw or dbt-modeled) so it has lineage, testing, and reproducibility. Per docs, Customer Studio traits map to warehouse columns. Reject notebook-derived traits as production sources.