What is the difference between "Drag & Drop Segmentation" and "Audience Builder"?

Question

From what I gathered:

Drag & drop segmentation provides a simple way to filter subscribers and send targeted and relevant messages. With drag & drop segmentation, you can:

• Accurately segment subscribers to help increase engagement.
• Save time with the easy-to-use interface.
• Increase the relevancy of your campaigns.
• Have a consistent experience segmenting both Lists and Data Extensions.

Meanwhile ...

The Audience Builder app allows you to segment your subscribers in sophisticated ways. This segmentation helps you better target your sends. Audience Builder provides you with a quicker and deeper understanding of your customer attributes and behavior.

So they both are able to segment subscribers but the documentation does not mention or give examples of how they differ.

So my question is :

1) What is the difference between "Drag & Drop Segmentation" and "Audience Builder"?

and

2) For the sample question below :

A marketing team needs to narrow down a customer population of several million subscribers based on eCommerce order details, and rapidly explore the data to find appropriate segments. How can segmentation with this scenario be accomplished?

Is the answer to the above question is 'Drag & Drop Segmentation' or 'Audience Builder'?

Answer 1

I can see where the confusion is, as the documentation blurs the lines.

With regards to segmentation in Marketing Cloud, this can be achieved via SQL activities or Filtered Data Extension. Filtered Data Extensions provide the drag and drop functionality.

Audience builder is a tool within sfmc that offers DRAG & DROP segmentation. The major differences between this and the Drag & Drop in Email studio is that dimensions have to be known in advance and CAN ONLY BE CONFIGURED BY SALESFORCE PROFESSIONAL SERVICES. This can be a problem during the implementation stage it does not lend itself to agile development (i.e allowing marketers to iteratively adjust dimensions). On a technical level, it runs on an Oracle database , which has slightly different rules to the rest of the suites which run on MS SERVER (the audience builder database is case sensitive).

Audience Builder allows you to segment your customers in sophisticated ways?

Yes it does. But these are static. Take for example you use a Recency , Frequency and Monetary cube to segment your customers. after 3 months, your BI team decides to tweak it a bit. You will have to reach out to salesforce to do this. Apart from how expensive it might be, it is usually the job of Data Architects, which are very few within SFMC and ridiculously over burdened.

References:

• Did Audience Builder and Contact Builder merge?