Behavior - Overlap Report
Identifying the overlapping intersect between two audiences.
The Concept
With Meta and Google being the top choices in digital marketing, we all have a fair bit of understanding of what audience based and intent based platforms are. Hence it becomes easier to understand that overlap of audiences work very differently as compared to Keywords, where overlap can be only at a Search term/query level.
In this Behavior overlap report, we try focus on identifying the overlap in two of your audiences. In this article, we will cover, the following:
How to execute an overlap report?
What audiences should you select?
What does the output means and how to draw inferences?
What can you do with the report?
How to execute an overlap report?
As shown in the gif below the process is straight forward.
Select 2 audiences at once in Omnibox. It can be two 1st party audiences, two third party audiences or a combination. The basic requirement is to select two audiences.
Go to Advanced options and check the Overlap box. Selecting Advanced AI is optional and it depends on how long you are willing to wait for the first result to come out.
Wait for Omnibox to calculate the audience significance category. 'Ideal' and 'Broad' are good to go ahead with. 'Niche', may or may not produce a result. But 'Insignificant' is a No Go.
Ensure that the country is correct. In case of 1st party audiences, the country will self populate. However, in case of 3rd party segments, ensure you select the country you want to run the report amongst the once you have access to.
Select the report as Behavior and Hit the arrow ( -> )that is pointing to the right. And you are on your way.
Reading an Overlap Report
An overlap report is more or less a Behavior Report and has most of the cards similar to the Behavior Report. If you want to know more about how to read a Behavior Report, please click here.
What is different in an Overlap report as compared to the Standard Behavior Report, is the audience that it considers. If you look at the first section, "How to execute an Overlap Report?", if states that you need to select 2 audiences (1st of 3rd party). What this type of report does is, it identifies the overlap between the 2 audiences and draws a report only on the intersecting section of the audiences. In the diagram below, it is the section in Light Pink.
Creating other complimenting reports
Reading this report in a way helps you understand the commonalities of two audiences. If you want to understand the unique side of the audience you want to run a Standard Behavior report and select one of the audience (let's call it A) and from the advanced option Exclude the other audience (let's call it B). Then you can run another standard Behavior report and Select audience B, to exclude Audience A from the advanced options. This will give you 3 reports, One with unique Audience A without any overlap with B, the other will give you a report with unique Audience B without any overlap with A. And the third report will be the overlap report that will give you a Behavior report of A's intersect with B.
When not to create other complimenting reports?
It is always advisable to run an overlap report first up, so that you get the Venn Diagram (that we will talk about up ahead). If the overlap is very high, then running complimentary reports may not have an impact as they will look similar to the overlap report. However, if the overlapping report is not significant, the running the complementary report may be a good idea.
Small audience with high overlap
There is another situation where one of the two audiences may be much smaller than the other. Hence, the overlap of the smaller audience may be very high. In such cases, try to run a complementary report of the bigger audience with less overlap along with the overlap report and the third report may not be required.
The Persona/Summary Card
Like any other standard Behavior Report with Advanced AI, you will get a persona/summary card for an overlap report that will draw a humanized persona for the overlapping section. If you create the other complimenting reports along with the overlap report, the summary card may given you a wonderful summarization of the difference in the audiences, unless it is a case where there is a small audience with high overlap.
The Venn Diagram
This card gives you a quick glimpse of the state of overlap between the two audiences.
To the right of the card if gives you the legend with the names of the audience along with its size. In the screenshot, both audiences are comparable in size of 2.1M and 2.2 M. However, their overlap though of a significant size, is relatively smaller of 233K. This gives us a signal to go ahead with the complimentary report explained above.
The Rest of the Report
As explained above, the rest of the report is exactly like a standard behavior report and you can learn to read it by visiting the article, Behavior Insights. It is designed to look like a standard behavior report, so that the comparisons between an overlap report and a complementary report is easier to accomplish .
To look at some of the use cases of the report, go to the Solve Section of consumr.ai. We have a couple of templates designed to help you execute a few reports yourself.
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