Compare Audiences Using Baselines

Overview

Every Audience Insights report compares your selected audience against a baseline. A baseline serves as a reference audience, allowing you to identify which characteristics are most distinctive about the audience or segment you're viewing. Rather than viewing data in isolation, comparing against a baseline helps reveal what makes an audience unique. You can change the selected baseline at any time while exploring an Audience Insights report.

Default Baselines

The default baseline depends on what you're viewing within the report.

When viewing the Full Audience, the default comparison is typically a country or global baseline.
When viewing an audience segment, the default comparison is the report's Full Audience.

This makes it easy to understand how an individual segment differs from the overall audience.

Available Baselines

Audience Insights provides several baseline options.

Geographic Baselines

Compare your audience against users from:

A specific country
A geographic region
A global audience

Many geographic baselines can also be refined by gender, allowing comparisons such as United States – Female or United Kingdom – Male.

Previous Reports

Every Audience Insights report you create automatically becomes available as a future baseline.

You can compare:

The full audience from a previous report.
Individual audience segments from previous reports.

This is useful for tracking changes over time or comparing similar audiences across multiple analyses.

Audience Segments

Within a report, you can compare:

An audience segment against the Full Audience.
One audience segment against another.
The Full Audience against another report.

These comparisons help identify the characteristics that distinguish one audience from another.

Change the Baseline

To select a different baseline:

Open an Audience Insights report.
Navigate to either the Full Audience or an audience segment.
Select the Compared To dropdown.
Choose the baseline you want to use.

The report updates immediately to display insights relative to the selected baseline.

Common Use Cases

Baselines can support a variety of audience analysis scenarios.

Understand Audience Segments

Compare an individual segment with the report's Full Audience to identify the characteristics that make that segment unique.

Compare Against a Market

Compare your audience against a country, region, or global baseline to understand how your audience differs from the broader population on X.

Track Audience Changes

Compare the same audience across reports created at different points in time to identify changes in audience characteristics, interests, or behaviors.

Compare Different Audiences

Use previous reports as baselines to compare different brands, campaigns, or customer groups.

Baseline Updates

Geographic baselines are refreshed periodically to ensure comparisons remain representative of current audiences.

Because baselines are updated over time, slight changes in comparison results may occur even when analyzing similar audiences.