👆Omnibox - The Starting Point

Introduction

The home page of consumr.ai dominated by the Omnibox.

Omnibox is an intelligent search box designed to provide absolute flexibility to the user in searching and selecting a combination of inputs, pick markets and choose a report they would like to see. All these while getting intelligent recommendations and filters to get specific information. The philosophy of Omnibox is to provide a flexible starting point of all curiosities an inquisitive marketer, strategist or senior executive may have about their business. Hence, it occupies a very special place in the product, that is the “Home Page”. In this instructional article, we will take you through the nuances of ‘Omnibox’ that will enable you to use it to its full potential.

Understanding The Omnibox

Selecting an Organization

Not a part of the Omnibox, but critical to using it, is the selection of an ‘Organization’. The way Consumr.ai is designed, its Access Management module connects everything to a hub, that is an ‘Organization’. Users, Platforms, Markets and modules and access to them is connected to an ‘Organization’. While configuring an ‘Organization’, platforms like Meta and Google are assigned to it and hence the ad accounts that carry first party audiences too.

When you are on the home page, selecting an ‘Organization’ helps pull all the 1st party audiences attached to the platform’s account and display it in the Omnibox. As a starting point, the same audiences are hence passed on to insights and plans and come in very handy at the time of activations.

The top bar that contains the Organization drop down

Once an ‘Organization’ is selected your Omnibox is ready to be explored. Click on the box and you a drop down opens. Since nothing is searched for it will show you the top connected audiences from the accounts mapped to the Organization that you have selected. It carefully explains with various tags, the platform they are from, the quality score that is calculated based on various factors and the account they are from. A look at the Omnibox’s placeholder text clearly states that you can search for audiences, keywords and even a URL. Click on Show More to see all the audiences.

Searching with The Omnibox

It’s a clean look that we have focused on with Omnibox, so try entering the something in it. Like in the Screenshot below, we have tried entering ‘Frag’ as four letters and the recommendations starts to show up.

Omnibox in action giving suggestions to a partially types search

There are three sections in the recommendations. All options starting with ‘frag’ are now visible. However, it is important to note that in each of these sections only the top options are shown, giving you a glimpse of what you can expect. Depending on your preference, please select ‘Show More’ link given right above each section.

Clicking on Show More will take you inside the section itself and the noise will vanish. For e.g: If select Show More for Interests, you will be taken inside the Interest section and Keywords along with audiences will disappear. Omnibox identifies your preference to explore Interests and gives you more options of interests starting with ‘frag’ (if available). You can click ‘<-’ and come back to all three sections.

Refreshing Audience list: This option applies to the 1st party audience list. There may be times when you add new 1st party audiences in platforms like Meta and you consumr.ai fails to pick it up instantly. When this happens, please click the refresh button and Omnibox will connect to the platform in real time and reconcile the audiences. This process takes about 15 mins.

Using the 'Show More' Audiences option in The Omnibox brings out more audience suggestions matching the search input

The same process can be followed with the Keywords and Interest Search as shown below.

Using the 'Show More' Interests option in The Omnibox brings out more interest suggestions matching the search input

In the interest section you can see that Interest, also known as 3rd Party audience segments, show from different platforms connected to the system. Also, right between the recommendations and the search area, you can see the search filters. This stripe of options provides you with filters to zero down on the input you want to select.

Selecting an Input in Omnibox

Let’s say, you have been searching for different options and you finally found the option you were looking for. You click on it, and it gets selected. It will neatly show your selected options that are responsive to the hover of your mouse.

Selected audiences shown clearly in The Omnibox

In the screenshot above, you can see that Omnibox has taken the audience (that we have selected in this case) and gathered a size, that it recommends is ‘Broad’ for executing the report. You sure can select more than one audience or keyword or interest. In that case the report will combine the inputs and give you report that shares insights on consumers, derived from all the inputs collectively.

As shown in the screenshot above you can add 2 audiences separated by a “|” and truncated, however hovering the mouse over these audiences gives you a full view of them in a drop down.

Towards the right, you can see the flag of the country the audience is from. There may be times when there will be no flag that will show up, it would mean that Omnibox is not able to arrive at a decision. This may happen in case there are data points from different markets. In such events, please feel free to click where the flag shows and select one or more countries from the drop down.

One or more countries can be selected in the Omnibox

Further right, you have the Report Type. Now that you have selected the input and the market, based on these selections, Omnibox displays a flag like ‘Broad’ in the screenshot, signifying that the audience size is big enough for you to proceed. You will now be required to decide what you want to see as an output. Each report type gives a different dimension of insight. For example, if you would like to analyze the behavior of an audience, select Behavior report. If you want to analyze Intent of your consumers, then choose a keyword and select Report type, Intent.

An option to select all valid reports to generate based on the input entered

Again, Omnibox is very responsive to your input and will give you eligible report types. In most cases it will also give you recommendations on what report to select by auto populating the default report type. In the Screen shot above, you can see report type options for both Audience and Intent inputs.

Further right, you can see the submit button. Once you are ready with the settings you can click the button to proceed drawing the insights. However, before we conclude this article there is one last element that add a great deal of flexibility in the inputs.

Advanced Filters

The Omnibox with its advanced options to customize your inputs

Advanced filters comprise of a mixture of advanced features and filters. It is not mandatory to set your advanced filters before fetching insights, Consumr.ai has the intelligence to use data to derive the skewness and pick the right filters to send through. Details of each options are listed below:

Advanced AI

There are 2 modes to all the reports:

a. Basic Report: Consider this as a quick report that gives you basic insights that are critical to infer the fundamental aspects of consumer behaviour.

b. Advanced AI: Enabling Advanced AI will add a few more insights to the basic report that helps you deep dive into the insights. It usually takes longer than a basic report.

Details of these reports will be explained in articles dedicated to each report type.

By default, Advanced AI is not selected, which means that all reports will run in basic mode to start with, unless you select Advanced AI from the filters.

Demography & Geo

Once you click advanced filters, Consumr.ai starts calculating the age range and gender to target using proprietary algorithm. You can then choose to change it or accept the recommendations it provides. Further down you see the City field that is empty. You can add cities if you have a predefined geo targeting, otherwise you can choose to click the ‘Recommend’ link there and Consumr.ai will pick out the top cities using the data of the audiences selected.

Exclude Audience

Excluding audience, like in Meta and Google ad platforms helps reduce the noise from your insights. For e.g: If you have an audience created of your website visitors and purchasers, you can remove purchaser from website visitors to identify the traits that differentiate a buyer from a window shopper. If used wisely, this field can add flavor to your insights and help in differentiating between audiences, more objectively.

Adding Interests & Intersects

Adding interest acts as a filter that passes with an “OR” condition (by default) with the audience that you have selected in the Omnibox. In simple terms, it means that it will add the bias of interests selected by you, to the primary audiences and show the drift via insights. Please note, that adding interest with an OR condition may have an impact on overall reach.

As another option, you can check the ‘Intersect’ checkbox that is right above the Interest field. Adding a check there will employ the “And” Intersect which will further filter down the audience. Please keep an eye out for the total audience size warning messages. You may not get great results if the audience size dips to ‘Insignificant’ or ‘Low’ category.

Special Category

This field is applicable for businesses that fall under the special category of Housing, Employment or Credit. This option restricts the targeting options for you.

Habits

The last option in advanced filters is Habits. Adding a habit option is not applicable on all platforms and will apply mainly to the Meta ecosystem. Options in Habits are fairly limited as compared to interests, but it can add a valuable filter should you want to go for Niche audience. Remember, this option will act with an “and” intersect, which means that it can have a significant impact on your reach.

Advanced Filters are dynamic in nature and will change based on Inputs, platforms and report types.

Conclusion

As they say, your output is only as good as your input. It applies to Consumr.ai as well. The purpose of Omnibox is to give you a variety of options and intelligent recommendations to ensure that you don’t go wrong with you input which in turn will give you powerful insights. Should you choose to proceed to the next level (beyond insights) the impact of a good input will continue to show right till the time you activate or even revisit to course correct your campaigns.