Audience Insights

Audience Insights provide visibility into how an audience’s membership changes over time, an audience’s potential reach, how enrichment changes reach, the distribution of attributes in an audience, and how much an audience overlaps with other audiences in your account. These insights can help improve the users you’re targeting to ensure your audience meets your business goals.

You can open Audience Insights from either the Audiences landing page or Audience Builder:

• From the Audience Builder, click the Insights tab. You can view audience insights for real-time and composable audiences in the Audience Builder.
• From the Audiences landing page, click the Insights icon on an audience’s row to open a dedicated Audience Insights page. This is only available for real-time audiences with an Active or Calculated status.

Analysis status

At the top of Audience Insights, you can find an overview of when the insights were last updated, the sample size used to calculate the different metrics, and how much historical data is available.

• Insights last update (UTC): The timestamp of the most recent analysis run. Insights refresh on a schedule rather than in real time:

  • Active audiences: Recalculations happen automatically once per day.
  • Inactive audiences: Recalculations happen whenever you modify the audience.

• Analysis results: The precision of the metrics shown.

  • Until you activate an audience, insights are estimates based on a small sample of your audience data and are labeled Estimate.
  • Once you activate the audience, or save it without activating it, insights are regenerated using a larger sample size and are labeled Precise.
• Historic data: How many days of historical data are available for the charts in Audience Insights. Longer date ranges and the Audience Health forecast become more meaningful as more history accumulates.

Historical data accumulates from the last time you edited the audience definition: each change to the membership criteria in the audience definition resets the historical data. For example, if you activate an audience and leave it unchanged for 30 days, Historic data shows 30 days and the insights display a 30-day historical trend. If you edit the criteria on day 31, metrics are calculated from that point forward. Inactive audiences don’t accumulate historical data, but you can still view insights based on the current definition.

Audience Health

The Audience Health section allows you to examine how your audience membership changes over time: how large the audience is, how fast it’s growing or shrinking, and where it’s likely headed next.

You can refer to this section to answer questions such as:

• Is this audience growing, stable, or declining in size?
• How many users join and leave the audience in a typical week?
• At what rate is the audience losing members, and is this rate changing over time?
• What size should I expect this audience to be over the coming weeks?

Audience Size

The Audience Size chart plots your audience membership across the selected date range. Use the 3 controls above the chart to change what it displays:

• Show Forecast: A toggle that projects the audience’s expected future size. See Forecast.
• Date range: A dropdown that sets the time window shown on the chart. Options include Today, 7 days, 15 days, 4 weeks, 8 weeks, 12 weeks, or a custom date range.
• Trend / Flux: A toggle that switches the chart between the Trend and Flux views described below.

The 3 cards above the chart summarize the audience at a glance. Each card shows a headline value plus the change compared to the previous period of the same length (for example, vs last 15 days), with an up or down arrow indicating the direction of change. Each card includes a help icon with an inline definition.

• Current size: The number of users who currently qualify for the audience, based on the most recent analysis.
• Net Change: The number of users added to or removed from the audience during the selected period.
• Net Change Rate: The relative number of users added to or removed from the audience during the selected period, expressed as a percentage of the total audience size. A lower Net Change Rate generally indicates a more stable audience.

Trend view

The Trend view is the default view for the Audience Health section, and shows an area chart that plots total audience size at each point across the selected window. The vertical axis is audience size and the horizontal axis is time, with a tick for each interval in the selected date range. Use the trend view to read the audience’s overall trajectory: whether it’s growing, holding steady, or declining.

Flux view

The Flux view is a grouped bar chart that shows movement in and out of the audience for each interval, rather than the running total. Each interval displays paired bars, labeled Entries and Exits, representing the users added to and removed from the audience during that period. Use the flux view to spot turnover and volatility that a stable total size can hide, such as an audience whose size looks flat but is actually cycling many users in and out each week.

Forecast

Turn on Show Forecast to project the audience’s expected size into the near future. mParticle draws the forecast as a continuation of the trend line, labeled Forecasted size, accompanied by a shaded 95% confidence range that widens the further out it projects. The historical portion of the line is labeled Actual.

• The forecast view requires a date range of at least 4 weeks. Select the 4 weeks, 8 weeks, or 12 weeks date range to enable it. The forecast view projects 4 weeks into the future.
• The flux view is disabled while the forecast view is on. The forecast applies only to the trend view’s total size line. Turn Show Forecast off to return to the flux view.

Overlaps

The Overlaps section shows how much the current audience overlaps with other audiences you’ve already created. Use it to avoid targeting the same users across multiple campaigns, identify redundant audiences, and find closely related segments.

A legend at the top of the section distinguishes the parts of each comparison: This audience, Other audiences, and the Overlap between them.

Use the 2 controls above the table to choose and order the comparisons:

• Compare audience: Select which audiences to compare against the current audience. Selected audiences appear as removable chips. By default, the 8 audiences with the highest overlap are shown. If fewer than 8 other audiences exist, all of them are shown.
• Sort by: Set the order of the table, for example Overlap: High to low.

Each row in the table compares the current audience against another audience:

Column	Description
Name	The name of the other audience being compared.
Overlap	A visual indicator of how much the audiences intersect.
Shared Users	The number of users who belong to both audiences.
Trends	The change in the overlap, with an up or down arrow.
Overlap (%)	The overlap expressed as a percentage in both directions: the share of this audience that’s also in the other audience, and the share of the other audience that’s also in this one. The 2 values use the legend colors.
Date Created	When the other audience was created.

Audience Performance

Reach

The Reach section helps you assess the potential reach of your campaign across different user identifiers.

• Track identified users per identifier, such as mParticle ID, Customer ID, or Email Address
• View coverage percentages for each identifier
• Compare reach across multiple identification methods

Each identifier count reflects unique identifiers, not unique users. A user with both an email address and a mobile phone number contributes to the count for each identifier type.

Use the tabs above the chart to choose what to compare:

• Overview: Compare total identifier counts across identifier types.
• Enrichment Breakdown: See how much reach comes from first-party data and how much comes from enrichment for each identifier type. This tab appears when Match Boost or Household Reach is enabled for the audience.

Select Today to review current reach. In Overview, a horizontal bar chart shows the current estimated count for each identifier type. Bar length represents the number of unique identifiers along the Estimate size axis.

In Enrichment Breakdown, select Today to see current reach for identifier types that Match Boost or Household Reach can enrich. Each horizontal bar represents one identifier type and has 2 segments:

• First-party: Identifiers sourced from your own mParticle data.
• Boosted: Identifiers added through Match Boost or Household Reach. When both features are enabled, this segment combines their contributions.

Select By Percentage to show each source as a percentage of the total identifier count for that identifier type, or By Count to show absolute identifier counts. Hover over a segment to see its count and percentage.

For example, if an email bar contains 10,000 identifiers and 2,000 came from enrichment, the Boosted segment represents 20% of those email identifiers. This doesn’t mean enrichment made 20% more audience members reachable. The Email Reach and Mobile Reach cards measure the percentage of audience members with an identifier available for each channel.

mParticle ID appears in the enrichment breakdown when Household Reach is enabled. Its Boosted segment reflects household expansion only, because Match Boost doesn’t add mParticle IDs.

Select a time range other than Today to see which identifier counts are increasing or decreasing. Use a shorter range to examine a recent change, or a longer range to follow a trend.

In Overview, the chart switches to a line chart, with one line per identifier type. Hover over a data point to see its estimated count and date. Select Daily (Average) to view daily changes, or Weekly (Average) or Monthly (Average) to compare averages over longer intervals.

In Enrichment Breakdown, select an identifier above the chart to examine how its first-party and boosted counts change. For example, if email identifier counts decline, the chart shows whether the decline comes from first-party data, enrichment, or both.

With Daily selected, stacked bars show first-party and boosted reach for each period, with a line showing total reach. Dashed vertical lines mark when Match Boost was enabled or disabled.

Choose Weekly (Average) to compare weekly averages in a stacked area chart, or Monthly (Average) to group data by month.

The historical Enrichment Breakdown chart displays at most 15 data points. With Last 4 weeks and Daily selected, days are grouped to fit this limit, so not every day appears individually. With Weekly (Average), the same range shows up to 4 weekly averages.

If data is unavailable for a period, this chart shows a gap or grayed-out bar. This doesn’t indicate audience loss.

You can also compare Match Boost snapshots using the By benchmarks view.

Benchmarking

The Benchmarking section shows your audience’s email and mobile phone reach and how many identifiers Match Boost added. Use it to compare reach before enrichment, when Match Boost was switched on or off, and today.

You can access Benchmarking below the Reach chart in the Insights tab in Audience Builder. It also appears when you review an audience in the Update Audience flow. The summary cards, benchmark chart view, and Identities table are available only for audiences where Match Boost has been enabled.

Reach summary

The 2 summary cards show how much of your audience you can reach through each channel:

• Email Reach: The percentage with an email identifier available for matching.
• Mobile Reach: The percentage with a mobile phone number available for matching.

Each card shows the current percentage and, when available, the change since Match Boost, with a help icon explaining the metric. These percentages describe identifier availability, not confirmed matches in downstream platforms.

Identities table

The Identities table compares estimated counts for each identifier type before enrichment, when Match Boost was enabled or disabled, and today. Benchmarking includes only identifier types that Match Boost can enrich, such as email addresses and phone numbers.

Column	Description
Original (date)	The identifier count at the audience’s first snapshot, before Match Boost ran.
Boost on (date)	The total identifier count when Match Boost was enabled, plus how much of that total was added by Match Boost.
Boost off (date)	The total identifier count when Match Boost was disabled, after identifiers added by Match Boost were removed. This column appears only when Match Boost has been disabled.
Current size (Today)	The latest total identifier count, plus how much of that total was added by Match Boost.

Audience membership and first-party identifier counts can change between snapshots. To identify Match Boost’s contribution, use the added by Boost count rather than the difference between total counts. For example, if Original contains 6,000 email identifiers and Current size (Today) contains 10,000, including 2,000 added by Match Boost, the count attributed to Match Boost is 2,000 even though the total grew by 4,000.

The count added by Match Boost can continue to grow between the Boost on and Current size (Today) snapshots as Match Boost finds new matches.

View reach by benchmark

In the Reach chart’s Enrichment Breakdown tab, select By benchmarks. Use the identifier selector to switch between the identifier types available for your audience.

Each stacked bar separates First-party identifiers from identifiers added by Match Boost at a benchmark: Original, Boost switched on, Boost switched off when applicable, and Current. The chart and Identities table use the same snapshots. The chart shows 1 identifier at a time, while the table shows all supported identifiers together.

Changes to benchmark history

Updating an audience’s definition clears its previous benchmarking history. The next snapshot becomes the new comparison baseline and is labeled Updated definition instead of Original.

If you enable and disable Match Boost multiple times, the benchmark chart and Identities table show a snapshot for each change. Periods when Match Boost was off show no Match Boost contribution. Match Boost data resumes after it’s enabled again.

Composition

The Composition section shows the distribution of different values of an attribute across your audience to understand your audience demographics and characteristics. Hover your cursor over each section of the pie chart to:

• See percentage breakdowns for each attribute
• Compare relative sizes of different user segments

To view user distribution according to a different attribute, use the dropdown menu to select the attribute. The composition view only includes single-value, non-numeric, non-calculated user attributes. Calculated attributes, list-type (multi-value) attributes, and attributes whose values are numeric are not available for selection.

Additionally, the composition view does not support selecting attributes with high cardinality: attributes that have a high number of unrepeated values. This includes attributes such as:

• First name
• Last name
• Phone number
• Email address
• Physical address
• Date of birth

For example, a pie chart displaying the many unique values of “First name” would not be very useful in comparison to a chart displaying a breakdown of your audience by “favorite genre”.

If you select a timeframe other than Today, the pie chart is replaced with a line chart to represent your data over time.

View reach and composition metrics over time

For the Reach and Composition metrics, you can add additional filters to understand how these metrics change over time.

For Reach, see Audience Performance. The timeframe and averaging interval controls described below apply to Composition. If no historical data is available to calculate audience metrics over time, these filters are disabled. Audience metrics over time are not available for overlaps.

Select a timeframe

Use the first dropdown above each chart to select how far back you want to view data for. Options include:

• Today
• Last 7 days
• Last 15 days
• Last 30 days
• Last 60 days
• Last 90 days

This determines the time window displayed in the chart.

If no data is available for a given time period within your selection, the line chart will display a dotted line to indicate the gap:

Data may be unavailable for one of the following reasons:

• The audience was inactive during that period.
• The period is earlier than the oldest available historical data.
• The period is earlier than the release of Audience Insights.

Choose an averaging interval

If you select a timeframe other than Today, a second dropdown appears allowing you to change the averaging interval. Options include:

• Daily (Average)
• Weekly (Average)
• Monthly (Average)

This setting smooths out fluctuations and makes it easier to identify broader audience trends.

Related tasks

• Create an audience
• Manage audiences