How to understand my Insights Report

Your audience Insights report consists of three reporting sections helping you understand the sociodemographic profile and the total estimated sizes of your audience in the online population.

1. Estimated audience size

An estimate of the size of your audience in the online population is calculated as part of the Audience Insights report. This estimate represents the maximum number of people that could conceivably make up your audience in the population, given the demographic profile of your audience.

For example, if the only distinguishing feature of your audience is that they are all male or all female, this estimate would be roughly half the size of the online population. If instead, your audience has multiple distinguishing demographic features, then the estimate will shrink accordingly.

This also means that if the demographic profile of your audience exactly matches that of the general population (meaning that there are no distinguishing features), this estimate will be equal to the entire online population.

2. Profile index

The profile index measures your audience relative to the online population, based on five demographic variables; gender, age, household income, education and household size, where the average online population is set to 100.

Values above 100 indicate that there is an over-representation in the audience compared to the average online population, whereas values below 100 indicate an under-representation compared to the average online population.

Whether a number close to or far from 100 is to be considered positive or negative when building audiences, will depend entirely on your expectations about the audience you intend to build. If the purpose is to generate general awareness in the online population or if the audience you intend to build is a very broad one, numbers at or around 100 would be considered good.

However, if the purpose is to build a more narrowly defined audience, success would be to get numbers higher than 100 for the demographic variables you expect to be overrepresented in your audience.

3. Profile Composition

The profile composition shows you the average profile of your audience in total and across each demographic variable: age, children, education, employment, gender, household size and income.

By clicking on each variable you will get a more detailed breakdown across that specific sociodemographic.