At its core, the technology behind Campaign Audience Builder consists of two vital building blocks - Apex & SOQL. There's no secret sauce involved at all. The audience identification algorithm queries records based on criteria using SOQL and then evaluates the relationships behind those records in an Apex layer. This operation is subject to the governor's limits, which are quite harsh when working with large data sets. So this is often done in many iterations by caching the results until all records have been evaluated. Caching happens either in a custom object or in the platform cache, depending on the specific customer requirements.

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What's so innovative about our tool is not the type of technology we're using, but rather how we apply the technology native to the Salesforce platform.

Also, we've built our front end using the Salesforce Lightning Design System and Lightning Web Components. There are many resources and guidelines for Visual Builders, which we followed for a seamless experience.

Why the Report Builder is less capable of complex segmentation than the Campaign Audience Builder

 UX Design and technical design are both heavily influenced by the problem you want to solve. The Report Builder is an astonishing tool for the three main requirements it is tackling:

• Extract data from your database based on filter criteria, which it solves with things like Report Types & Cross-Object Filters
• Present data to the user in a digestible format: Create Beautiful Dashboards with a few clicks, apply Conditional Highlighting, ...
• Allow the user to explore the data: Add Groupings and Formula Fields, create Bucket Fields, ...

Campaign Audience Builder shares only one of those main requirements with the Report Builder: It also extracts data based on filter criteria. As segmentation is at the heart of our tool, we'refocusing on the single main requirement. That allows us to do some trade-offs the report builder cannot do:

Build a User Interface focussed on cross-object filtering

The Campaign Audience Builder design has a ton of space to express the relationships involved in a visually appealing way. The Report Builder's preview panel takes up to let users explore the data as they build the report.

Ditch data visualization to allow for more complex relationship handling

The data visualization part of the Campaign Audience Builder is nonexistent. There are so many possible ways to combine objects that it's just not feasible to visualize all this connected data in one chart. Therefore, there's nothing regarding data visualization that we need to consider in our design choices. You get a visual representation of your data relationships and a list of contacts or leads as a result.

Allocate all resources on one technical challenge

Regarding resource allocation, Campaign Audience Builder does not need to extract a lot of data, so users can play around with it. In a situation where the Report Builder extracts and presents 200 Opportunities that meet criteria related to an Account appealingly, Campaign Audience Builder only needs to query for the related opportunities to identify the relevant data and doesn't need to process or present any data.

Comparing apples and oranges

Comparing the Report Builder with the Campaign Audience Builder is like comparing apples with oranges. The Report Builder can also help you with segmentation, but it does many other things. Those other features lead to trade-offs, which harm segmentation capabilities. Campaign Audience Builder triples down on segmentation, but it can't help you with other problems that the Report Builder tackles.