Reading your Overlap Report

Overview 

An Overlap Report has a single view: a matrix that tells you how much each account's audience is shared with the others in the basket. Three display modes, Percentage, Absolute and Graph, let you read the same data through three different lenses, and a Compare Sources filter lets you narrow the matrix when the basket is crowded.

 Navigating the Report

Open a finished report from the Reports List. You'll land on the single Overlap report view. The header shows the report name and the channel it was built on (e.g., Instagram); the body is the overlap matrix. Three controls sit above the table:

• Mode toggle: Switch between Absolute, Percentage and Graph.
• Compare Sources: Filter which accounts appear in the matrix.
• Actions: Report-level actions (definition, downloads), covered at the end.

 The Matrix at a Glance

The matrix is laid out the same way in Absolute and Percentage modes, only the cell values change. Rows are sources (the account whose follower base is the denominator); columns are the accounts those followers are checked against, with a Total column on the left that shows each account's follower base.

Three quick rules of the road for reading the table:

• Diagonal cells are always “—”. An account isn't compared against itself.
• Cells are colour-coded as a heatmap. Stronger overlap reads as a darker cell — the matrix gives you a shape before you read any number.
• Read along a row to see how a single account's audience is distributed. Read down a column to see who feeds the most followers into that account.

Percentage Mode (default)

Percentage is the default mode and usually the right starting point. Each cell shows the share of the row account's followers who also follow the column account.

The reason it's the default: percentage normalises across very different audience sizes. If your basket mixes a global brand with a niche creator, the absolute numbers will be dominated by the big account, but the percentage view reveals whether the small account is actually closer to the big one's audience than another small account is. The highest-percentage cells (excluding the diagonal) are the strongest audience-proximity signals.

Absolute Mode

Absolute mode shows the raw count of shared followers in each cell. Switch to it when the question is about magnitude, “how many real people are we talking about?”.

Absolute and Percentage often tell complementary stories. A small overlap percentage against a huge follower base can still be a large shared audience in absolute terms, meaningful for a co-sponsorship decision. A big percentage against a tiny follower base is a precise signal but doesn't necessarily move many people. Reading both modes side by side is how you avoid mistaking precision for scale.

Graph Mode

Graph mode is the visual version of the matrix. Each account in the basket is drawn as a band, and the band splits into the share that's unique to that account and the streams that flow to each of the other accounts. The thickness of each stream is proportional to the shared followers between the two accounts.

Two patterns are easy to spot in Graph mode and harder to read off the table:

• A wide band that's mostly “unique”: The account owns a large, distinctive audience that doesn't overlap much with the rest of the basket.
• A band with thick streams to every other account: The account's audience is broadly shared with the rest of the basket; it's not bringing distinctive reach.

Use Graph mode when you want a quick visual sense of where each account sits; switch back to Percentage or Absolute when you need exact figures.

Compare Sources

The Compare Sources button (top-right of the view) opens a “Choose Sources to compare” panel with a checkbox per account, plus an “All” shortcut. Tick the accounts you want and click Apply — the table and graph redraw with only those accounts. Clear selection resets the view.

Two practical uses for it:

• Drop an outlier. If one account in the basket is on a very different scale and is washing out the heatmap, deselecting it lets the remaining comparisons read more cleanly.
• Focus on a pair. With three or more accounts in the basket, isolating two gives you a focused, two-by-two read for a specific competitive comparison.

 Report-level Actions

The Actions menu in the top-right of the report exposes three actions that operate on the whole report (not the current mode):

• See report definition. Opens the channel and the list of accounts you set when creating the report. Handy when you've come back to an older report and want to remember exactly what's in it — or when you're about to clone it.
• Download absolutes view. Exports the matrix in absolute counts — shared-followers numbers for every pair of accounts.
• Download percentages view. Exports the matrix in percentages — the directional shares you see in the Percentage mode.

 Putting it Together

Once you know the modes, the report becomes a fast read. A useful default pattern:

• Open in Percentage mode. Scan the off-diagonal cells, the highest percentages tell you which accounts have the strongest audience proximity, taking size out of the equation.
• Switch to Absolute. Re-read the same cells in raw counts; that's where the campaign-level magnitudes live.
• Switch to Graph for the shape. Wide “unique” bands are defensible reach; thick streams between two accounts are tight audience proximity.
• Use Compare Sources when the basket is busy, drop the outlier or isolate the pair you actually want to compare.

Three modes, three sentences, thirty seconds. That's enough to draw a strategy conclusion; the downloads are where you go when the conclusion needs to land in a deck.