Interpreting Index and Audience Share
When analyzing audience insights, both Index and Audience Share are crucial metrics. Best practice is to consider them together — using their combined strengths based on your business goal, campaign use case, and the specific question you're trying to answer.
What is Index?
Index measures how much more (or less) likely your audience is to exhibit a specific behavior or trait compared to the general population or another baseline. It helps highlight unique behaviors and affinities — in other words, what makes your audience different.
Think of Index as a “uniqueness detector.”
High Index values reveal areas where your audience over-indexes, pointing you toward traits that could help differentiate your messaging or strategy.
When you're aiming for precision targeting or differentiation, give more weight to Index.
Index is especially powerful when analyzing:
Traits with many options (multi-select behaviors or categories)
Broadly adopted categories (e.g., brand preferences, media channels, product usage)
What is Audience Share?
Audience Share tells you how much of your audience falls into a particular category or possesses a certain attribute. It reflects potential scale — i.e., how many people you could reach if you activated against that trait.
Think of Audience Share as “net size.”
Use it when reach, volume, or growth are your priorities.
Best Practice:
Start with Index to uncover what’s distinctive. Then, check Audience Share to ensure that insight is scalable enough to act on. A high Index with almost no Audience Share might not be worth pursuing — but a moderately high Index with decent Share might be your sweet spot.
Example : Promoting Wellness product
You are promoting a new wellness supplement and looking for the best lifestyle behavior to feature in your messaging. 40% of your audience drinks herbal tea regularly, but the Index is 1.1X. Meanwhile, just 6% of your audience uses meditation apps, but the Index is 3X.
➡️ Insight: Meditation apps offer low scale but high uniqueness — your audience is much more likely than average to use them. This makes them a strong signal if you're aiming for differentiation or building a niche campaign. Herbal tea, on the other hand, gives you broad reach but isn’t very distinctive. If you're trying to drive mass awareness, it may still be a helpful anchor — but it won’t set you apart.