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FAQ

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Overview

Audience Insights provides a holistic overview of the users visiting your site and their on-site behaviors. By analyzing cohort composition, engagement patterns, and content preferences, publishers can build compelling data narratives for advertisers, optimize targeting strategies, and demonstrate the value of their first-party audiences. Audience Insights enables you to filter by cohorts or tags and explore five key dimensions: Engagement, Technographics, Index & Overlap, Third-Party data, and Content Read. Each dimension provides unique insights into who your audiences are and how they interact with your content.

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Why Use Audience Insights?

Understand audience behavior at scale — Engagement metrics reveal how users in your cohorts interact with your site, from session length to articles viewed, helping you quantify audience value for advertisers. Create compelling RFP responses — Transform raw data into rich narratives that demonstrate audience quality, engagement depth, and content affinity to win more direct-sold campaigns. Discover audience relationships — Index and Overlap analysis shows how your cohorts compare to each other, revealing hidden connections and opportunities for audience extension.

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Concepts

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Definitions

  • Base Cohort: The baseline audience used for comparison in Index calculations. Typically set to “Everyone” to compare a specific cohort against all site users. Only one base cohort can be selected at a time.
  • Comparison Cohorts: The cohorts you want to measure against the base cohort in Index & Overlap reports. You can select multiple comparison cohorts or tag groups.
  • Index: A score indicating how much more or less likely users in a cohort are to exhibit a behavior compared to the base cohort. An index of 100 is the baseline (equal likelihood), above 100 indicates higher likelihood (e.g., 125 = 25% more likely or 1.25x), and below 100 indicates lower likelihood.
  • Overlap: The percentage of users in your selected cohort who also belong to a comparison cohort. For example, a 53% overlap with “Pet Owners” means 53% of users in your cohort are also in the Pet Owners cohort.
  • Uniques: The number of unique users who have been active on-site during the filtered date range and are members of the selected cohort.
  • Sessions: The number of sessions completed by users in the selected cohorts during the filtered timeframe. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
  • Pageviews: The number of pageview events fired by users in the selected cohorts during the filtered timeframe.
  • Minimum Uniques: A filter threshold that excludes comparison cohorts below a specified size from Index & Overlap reports, ensuring statistical relevance.

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Workflows

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Filtering Audience Insights

Publishers configure Audience Insights by selecting cohorts or tags to analyze, then applying secondary filters such as date range, domain, device type, country, and platform. These filters allow precise segmentation of audience data for specific analysis needs.

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Analyzing Engagement Metrics

The Engagement tab displays key metrics about audience activity including unique users, sessions, pageviews, average time spent, average session length, and articles viewed per session. This data supports RFP responses by quantifying how engaged a cohort is with your content.

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Comparing Cohorts with Index & Overlap

Index & Overlap analysis reveals relationships between cohorts by showing both how likely users are to belong to multiple cohorts (index) and what percentage actually overlap. This helps identify audience extension opportunities and validate targeting assumptions.

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Exploring Content Preferences

Content Read insights surface the custom properties from your Pageview events that resonate most with specific cohorts—from most-read authors to highest-indexed article categories. This enables content-based targeting recommendations for advertisers.

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Guides

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Configuring Audience Insights Filters

All Audience Insights reports share a common filtering system that allows you to focus on specific audiences and contexts.
1

Select your audience

Click Edit next to Audience to choose which cohorts to analyze. You can select:
  • A single cohort
  • Multiple cohorts
  • A tag group (all cohorts with a specific tag)
2

Configure secondary filters

Click Edit next to Filter to apply additional parameters:
  • Date Range: Last day, last 7 days, last 30 days, or custom range (up to 18 months lookback)
  • Domain: Filter by specific domains if Permutive is deployed across multiple sites
  • Device Type: Desktop, Mobile, or Tablet
  • Countries: Filter by geographic location
  • Platform: Web, AMP, FIA, iOS, or Android
3

Apply filters

Click Apply to update the reports with your selected filters.
If you encounter timeout errors, reduce the complexity of your report by removing some filters or narrowing the date range. Complex queries with multiple cohorts and filters may take longer to process.

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Viewing Engagement Insights

Engagement insights provide data about the level of on-site activity for your selected cohorts.
1

Navigate to Engagement

In Audience Insights, select the Engagement tab.
2

Review key metrics

Analyze the following data points:
  • Uniques: Number of unique users active in the cohort during the date range
  • Sessions: Total sessions completed by cohort members
  • Pageviews: Total pageview events from cohort members
  • Average Time Spent (Mins): Average browsing time per user
  • Average Session Length: Average duration of each session
  • Articles Viewed Per Session: Average pageviews per session
3

Download data

Click the download icon in the upper right corner of any chart to export as CSV or PNG.
Some platforms have data collection limitations that affect Engagement metrics. See the Environment Compatibility section for details on which metrics are available per platform.

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Using Index & Overlap

Index & Overlap helps you understand how your audiences relate to each other.
1

Navigate to Index & Overlap

In Audience Insights, select the Index & Overlap tab.
2

Set the base cohort

Select a base cohort from the dropdown. This is the baseline for index calculations.
It is common practice to select Everyone to see how likely cohort members are to belong to other cohorts compared to all site users. However, if you have a lot of “passerby” traffic (single pageview visitors) it can also be useful to set this to a group of users that have done at least 2 or 3 pageviews across all of your properties to view a more normalized set of indices.
3

Select comparison cohorts

Choose the cohorts or tag groups you want to compare against. You can also click Select All Cohorts to compare against your entire cohort library.
Selecting too many / all cohorts for comparison can cause slow loading times or timeout issues due to the significant processing required for these reports. Try creating a tag for cohorts that are valuable for insights reporting in order to quickly filter this view to relevant comparison cohorts.
4

Set minimum uniques (optional)

Apply a minimum uniques threshold to filter out small cohorts that may not provide statistically meaningful results.
5

Interpret the results

For each comparison cohort, review:
  • Overlap %: What percentage of your selected cohort also belongs to the comparison cohort
  • Index: How much more or less likely users are to be in the comparison cohort vs. the base

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Viewing Technographics

Technographics provide insights into the devices, platforms, browsers, and locations of your audience.
1

Navigate to Technographics

In Audience Insights, select the Technographics tab.
2

Review breakdowns

Analyze audience composition across:
  • Device Type: Desktop, Mobile, Tablet distribution
  • Platform: Web, AMP, FIA, iOS, Android distribution
  • Browser: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge, etc.
  • Country: Geographic distribution
  • Province/City: Regional breakdowns (where available)
3

Export visualizations

Download pie charts as CSV data or PNG images for presentations.

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Viewing Third-Party Insights (Beta)

Third-Party Insights is currently in Beta. Data is provided by Eyeota and shows how your cohorts index against third-party audience segments.
1

Navigate to Third-Party

In Audience Insights, select the Third-Party tab.
2

Select a data category

Choose from available categories:
  • Demographics: Age, gender, household composition
  • B2B: Industry, company size, job function
  • Consumer Intent: Purchase intent signals
  • Automobile Intent: Vehicle purchase interests
  • Travel Intent: Travel and destination interests
3

Set the base cohort

Select the base cohort for index comparison (typically “Everyone”).
4

Interpret results

Review how your cohort indexes against Eyeota’s third-party segments. For example, an index of 104 for “Female” means users in your cohort are 4% more likely to be female than the average user.

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Viewing Content Read Insights

Content Read surfaces the custom properties from your Pageview events that are most associated with your selected cohorts.
1

Navigate to Content Read

In Audience Insights, select the Content Read tab.
2

Review indexed properties

The dashboard displays your custom Pageview properties (e.g., article.author, article.category, article.keywords) ranked by how strongly they index for your selected cohort.
3

Identify content patterns

Use the data to understand what content types, authors, sections, or topics resonate most with specific audiences.

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Viewing Hourly/Daily Activity

Deprecation Notice: The Hourly/Daily Activity feature will be removed from the platform effective January 19, 2026 and may already be ineffective in some workspaces. Plan to transition any workflows that depend on this feature.
Hourly/Daily Activity shows when your audiences are most likely to be online, enabling optimized ad scheduling.
1

Navigate to Hourly/Daily Activity

In Audience Insights, select the Hourly/Daily Activity tab (if available).
2

Configure filters

Note that the date range filter does not apply to this tab. Data is always aggregated from the last week. Hover over the information icon to see the exact date range.
3

Set the base cohort

Select a base cohort to compare activity patterns against.
4

Choose a breakdown

Select how to segment the data:
  • All: Entire cohort across all platforms and devices
  • Device: Breakdown by Desktop, Mobile, Tablet
  • Platform: Breakdown by AMP, Android, FIA, iOS, Web
5

Analyze activity patterns

Review the two graphs:
  • Activity: Time of Day: 24-hour activity pattern showing when users are most likely to be online
  • Activity: Day of Week: 7-day pattern showing which days have highest engagement
All times in Hourly/Daily Activity reports are displayed in UTC.

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Adding Domains to Filters

If you have Permutive deployed across multiple domains, you can add them to enable domain-specific filtering.
1

Navigate to Settings

Go to Settings in the Permutive Dashboard.
2

Open Project settings

Click on the Project tab.
3

Edit domains

Under Domains, click Edit.
4

Add a domain

Enter the domain in its cleanest form (e.g., support.permutive.com rather than https://support.permutive.com) and click + Add.
5

Save changes

Click Save to apply the changes.
Permutive will only start collecting data for a domain from when it was added to the Domains list. Historical data is not retroactively associated with newly added domains.

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Exporting Audience Insights Reports

Export your insights as images, spreadsheets, or PDF reports for presentations and stakeholder sharing.
1

Configure your filters

Set all desired filters before exporting, as they cannot be changed during the export process.
2

Start the export

Click the green Export Report button in the top right corner of the Insights page.
3

Wait for charts to load

A loading indicator shows progress. Depending on filter complexity, this may take some time.If some charts fail to load, a Retry button will appear to reload them.
4

Preview and export

Review the export preview, then choose an export format:
  • Export chart images: Downloads all charts as individual images in a ZIP file
  • Export to Excel: Downloads raw data as an Excel spreadsheet with each chart as a separate sheet
  • Print Report: Opens print dialog where you can save as PDF

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Introduction to Enterprise Workspaces

Enterprise Workspaces organize publishers and alliances into a hierarchy, with each business unit having its own Permutive workspace. Understanding how data flows through this hierarchy is essential for interpreting Audience Insights correctly.
1

Understand data rollup

Data in Enterprise Workspaces flows upward through the hierarchy:
  • Organization Workspace: Has access to data from all workspaces
  • Parent Workspace: Can access data from its child workspaces
  • Child Workspace: Only has access to its own data
When viewing Audience Insights, you see data aggregated from your current workspace and all its descendants.
2

Understand cohort propagation

Cohorts flow downward through the hierarchy:
  • Cohorts created in a parent workspace are deployed to all child workspaces
  • Cohorts created in a child workspace are not visible in parent workspaces
Example: A cohort created in the Organization workspace will be available in all Business Unit and Publication workspaces below it.
3

Check your workspace context

The Audience filter in Insights only shows cohorts available to your current workspace. This includes:
  • Cohorts created in your current workspace
  • Cohorts inherited from parent workspaces
This ensures no data leakage between organizational units.
4

Interpret your Insights data

Remember that Insights data reflects your workspace’s position in the hierarchy:
  • At Organization level: Data aggregated from all workspaces
  • At Business Unit level: Data from that unit and its publications
  • At Publication level: Data from that publication only
Cohort sizes and metrics will vary based on which workspace you’re viewing.
Predicted and live audience sizes always reflect the workspace you’re currently viewing, even for cohorts inherited from parent workspaces.

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Troubleshooting

Cause: The query is too complex due to multiple filters, large date ranges, or many cohorts selected.Solution:
  • Reduce the number of cohorts or filters selected
  • Narrow the date range
  • Remove less critical secondary filters
  • If the issue persists, contact support
Cause: The domain hasn’t been added to your project settings.Solution:
  • Navigate to Settings > Project > Domains
  • Add the domain and save
  • Note: Data collection begins from when the domain is added; historical data won’t appear
Cause: Quantile limits filter out less popular content to optimize performance.Solution:
  • This is expected behavior for long-tail content
  • Contact your Customer Success Manager if you need to adjust quantile thresholds for specific properties
Cause: Some platforms have SDK limitations that prevent certain metrics from being collected.Solution:
  • Review the Environment Compatibility table to understand which metrics are available per platform
  • This is a platform limitation, not a configuration issue
Cause: The minimum uniques threshold is filtering out all comparison cohorts.Solution:
  • Lower or remove the minimum uniques filter
  • Ensure the selected comparison cohorts have sufficient user activity in the date range
Cause: Some charts failed to load due to query complexity or timeout.Solution:
  • Click the Retry button to attempt reloading failed charts
  • If retries fail, simplify your filters and try again
  • Charts that don’t load won’t appear in the export
Cause: The cohort was created in a child workspace and you’re viewing a parent workspace.Solution:
  • Cohorts only propagate downward in the hierarchy
  • To use a cohort across multiple workspaces, create it in a parent workspace
  • Navigate to the workspace where the cohort was created to access it

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Environment Compatibility

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Core Product

Audience Insights data availability varies by platform due to SDK limitations:
MetricWebAMPFIAiOSAndroid
UniquesYesYesYesYesYes
SessionsYesNoYesYesYes
PageviewsYesNoYesNoNo
Articles Viewed Per SessionYesNoYesYesYes
Average Session LengthYesNoYesNoNo

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Platform-Specific Notes

PlatformSupportNotes
Web✓Full support for all Audience Insights features
AMP~Limited support; Sessions, Pageviews, and Session Length not available
FIA✓Full support for all features
iOS~Uniques, Sessions, and Articles Per Session available; Pageviews and Session Length not available
Android~Uniques, Sessions, and Articles Per Session available; Pageviews and Session Length not available

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Dependencies

DependencyRequiredDescription
Permutive SDK✓Required for collecting user behavior data that powers all Audience Insights
Cohorts✓At least one cohort must exist to filter Audience Insights reports
Eyeota Integration~Required only for Third-Party Insights (Beta). Contact your CSM to enable.
Domain Configuration~Required only if filtering by domain. Domains must be added in Settings > Project.

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Limits

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Data Retention

FeatureDescriptionLimit
Lookback WindowMaximum historical data available for analysis18 months
Hourly/Daily ActivityData aggregation periodLast 7 days (fixed)

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Performance Limits

MetricDescriptionLimit
Query TimeoutMaximum time for report generationVaries by complexity
Export Load TimeTime for charts to render in export previewVaries by filter complexity

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Feature Limits

FeatureDescriptionLimit
Base Cohort SelectionNumber of base cohorts per report1
Comparison CohortsNumber of cohorts for Index & OverlapVaries by complexity

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FAQ

Audience Insights analyze users based on cohort membership and on-site behavior, helping you understand who your audiences are and how they engage with content.Campaign Insights analyze users who have interacted with specific advertising campaigns (via SlotClicked and SlotViewable events), helping you measure and optimize campaign performance.
Index scores use 100 as the baseline:
  • 100 = Equal likelihood to the base cohort
  • Above 100 = More likely (e.g., 150 = 50% more likely, or 1.5x)
  • Below 100 = Less likely (e.g., 75 = 25% less likely, or 0.75x)
For example, an index of 125 means users are either 1.25x more likely or 25% more likely than the base cohort.
AMP and mobile SDKs have platform limitations that prevent certain metrics from being collected. For example, AMP doesn’t support session tracking, so Sessions, Pageviews, and Session Length metrics are unavailable. This is a platform constraint, not a configuration issue.
Quantile limits filter out less popular content to optimize performance. For example, a 0.5 (50%) limit on article titles keeps only the top 50% most-viewed titles. Content below the threshold appears as null values. This reduces storage costs and improves query speed while retaining the most meaningful data.
Audience Insights supports an 18-month lookback window, starting from when you first deployed Permutive on your site. This extended history is possible because Permutive uses first-party cookies, and it enables seasonal campaign optimization and long-term trend analysis.
Yes. Use the Export Report button to download:
  • Chart images (ZIP file of individual PNGs)
  • Excel spreadsheet (raw data with each chart as a sheet)
  • PDF (via Print dialog, save as PDF)
Set all your filters before exporting, as they cannot be modified during the export process.
Hourly/Daily Activity is being deprecated and will be removed from the platform on January 19, 2026. If you rely on this feature, plan to transition your workflows before that date.
Third-Party Insights (currently in Beta) show how your cohorts index against third-party audience segments provided by Eyeota. Categories include Demographics, B2B, Consumer Intent, Automobile Intent, and Travel Intent. This helps enrich your first-party data with additional audience characteristics.
The base cohort establishes the baseline for index calculations. Setting it to “Everyone” compares your selected cohort against all site users, answering “how much more likely are these users to exhibit X behavior than the average user?” You can also set a specific cohort as the base for more targeted comparisons.
In Enterprise Workspaces, Insights data rolls up through the hierarchy:
  • Organization level sees aggregated data from all workspaces
  • Parent workspaces see data from their child workspaces
  • Child workspaces see only their own data
The Audience filter shows only cohorts available to your workspace (those created locally or inherited from parent workspaces). Cohort sizes reflect data from your current workspace and its descendants.

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Changelog

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2026

January 2026
  • Hourly/Daily Activity feature will be removed from the platform

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2023

February 2023
  • Added Export Reports functionality for Audience, Campaign, and Revenue Insights
  • Support for PDF, Excel, and image exports

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2021

July 2021
  • Updated Hourly/Daily Activity with improved filtering and breakdown options

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2020

June 2020
  • Added Third-Party Insights (Beta) with Eyeota integration
  • Categories: Demographics, B2B, Consumer Intent, Automobile Intent, Travel Intent
May 2020
  • Launched Audience Insights with Engagement, Technographics, Index & Overlap, and Content Read tabs
For detailed changelog information, visit our Changelog.