Beside every audience you build is a panel describing the guests who currently match it: how many there are, where they come from, what they spend, how long they stay. Read it before you build the campaign and it will tell you two things worth knowing early, that the audience is too small to bother with, or that the field you are about to segment on is mostly empty.
Audiences covers the mechanics of getting the panel to calculate at all. This article is about what the figures mean once it has.
Where to find it
Open Audiences, then create or open an audience. The panel occupies the right-hand side of the editor, under two headings, Customers and Reservations.
Select Load preview, at the top of the editor next to Save, and select it again after every change to the filters. Until you do, the cards describe something other than your audience. See Audiences for why.
What the cards show
The cards come in two shapes.
Breakdowns show the largest values as percentages. Under Customers these are Gender, Generation, Country, Language and Classification. Under Reservations they are Channel Segment, Channel Category, Market Segment, Market Category, Rate Code and Purpose.
Single figures show one number with its unit: Average Stay Length in nights, Average Time Booked Ahead in days, Average Guests Per Stay in guests, and Average Spend Per Night and Average Spend Per Stay in your account currency.
Total, at the top, is the number of guests in the audience. It counts guests, not reservations.
The percentages will not add up to 100
This is expected. Each breakdown lists its largest values rather than every value, and the figures come from a sample rather than the whole audience. A Purpose card reading 88% Leisure and 2% Business is not missing 10% of your guests; the remainder sits in values the card does not list.
The panel says as much itself:
"Note that real-time insights are limited to a sample with an accuracy near 100%. For a full report please visit the insights page after publishing the audience."
Treat the panel as a decision aid rather than a report. When you need exact figures, publish the audience and look at it in Bookboost Insights.
What to look for before you send
Is the audience big enough? Read Total. An audience of a few dozen guests rarely justifies a campaign build.
Is the field I am segmenting on actually populated? This is the panel's most useful job, and the reason to look before you build rather than after. If the Gender card is overwhelmingly Unknown, a gender-based audience will reach almost nobody. The same applies to Language, which decides which language version of a campaign a guest receives, so a mostly-empty Language card is a warning about every multilingual campaign you send to this audience.
Is this audience who I think it is? Average Stay Length and Average Spend Per Stay are quick sanity checks. If an audience meant to isolate long stays averages two nights, a filter is wrong.
Where do these guests come from? Channel Segment, Channel Category, Market Segment and Rate Code show the commercial mix, which matters whenever the campaign mentions rates or offers.
What this does not do
It does not give you exact numbers. The figures are sampled and the breakdowns are partial.
It does not tell you who is reachable, or who has consented. A guest counts toward Total whether or not you hold contact details for them and whether or not they have given consent. Use the Reachable filter for the first and check consent separately.
It does not save with the audience. The panel is calculated on demand, so there is no record of what the audience looked like when it was built.
An empty card is not a failure. A card still reading No data available for the selected period after a preview means the underlying field is empty for these guests.
What to do next
If Total is not the number you expected, start with the app the audience is set to, because that decides which guests it can reach at all. See The App selector on an audience.
The same figure appears as Customer Matches on The Audiences list screen, where Reach recalculates it without opening the audience.
Getting help
Open Help at the bottom of the left menu and choose Talk to us. Tell us the audience name and the figure you are questioning, and confirm you selected Load preview immediately before reading it, because a stale panel accounts for most reports of a wrong number.