Reading Insights Reports to Identify Opportunity

When your run an insights report you typically analyze how your file compares to the benchmark by comparing penetration and index.

Penetration is the number of households expressed as a percentage of your Audience File that are classified as having a certain characteristic expressed as a percentage of the total households in a file. For example, 15% of your customers drive a domestic automobile.

An index is calculated by comparing the penetration (%) of a characteristic between the file and the benchmark. Continuing with the example above, if 15% of your customer Audience File drives domestic automobiles and 10% of the people in the benchmark market drive domestic automobiles, your customers index 150 (15 / 10 x 100) or are 1.5 times more likely to drive a domestic car than the market average.

Typically opportunity can be identified in a target market through an over indexed attribute, which is what’s used in the Opportunity Dashboard. But it extends to all attributes in the report as well.

For example, if I find that CP24 is the most widely watched TV channel in an Audience File containing my customers, and it also has an index of over 100, it might be worthwhile to run a television advertising campaign on CP24 since there’s a high statistical likelihood that more people like my current customer base can be reached. When you combine this with the fact that you can now see these detailed insights for just your high performing intelligentSEGMENTS, it gives a lot more granularity in the insights to identify different marketing plans for different target segments.