Overview
Follow this guide to learn how to use the Cluster Comparison feature within the Influencers & Brands tab of an Audiense Insights report.
Cluster Comparison allows you to compare your Profile Groups (formerly known as Custom Rankings) across every audience cluster in your report. Using an interactive heatmap, you can quickly identify which brands, influencers, or profile groups have the strongest relationships with different audience segments.
This article explains how to interpret the heatmap, compare individual profiles, understand the color scale, apply filters, and use Profile Groups to support competitor analysis, influencer research, and audience strategy.
Understanding the Cluster Comparison Heatmap
The Cluster Comparison feature is located within the My Profile Groups sub-tab of the Influencers & Brands section of your Insights report.
The heatmap provides a visual comparison of how each Profile Group performs across the audience clusters identified within your report. This makes it easy to identify patterns, compare audiences, and determine which groups have the strongest relationships with each segment.
How Clusters Are Organized
Within the heatmap, audience clusters are automatically ordered by size.
The Full Audience always appears first, followed by the remaining clusters from largest to smallest. This ordering matches the Audience Breakdown page, making it easy to compare insights across different areas of the report.
By default, the heatmap is sorted by Affinity, but you can also switch to Uniqueness to explore your data from a different perspective.
Likewise, Profile Groups are ranked according to their highest Affinity with the full audience, allowing you to quickly identify the groups with the strongest overall relationship to your audience.
Compare Individual Profiles
Selecting a Profile Group allows you to drill down from the group level to the individual profile level. Rather than viewing aggregated scores for the entire group, this view displays the Affinity or Uniqueness score for each individual X account within the selected Profile Group. This detailed view helps identify which individual brands or influencers contribute most to the group's overall performance and highlights the strongest accounts within each audience cluster.
Important: Scores are only calculated for profiles that appear within the top 20,000 profiles of each audience cluster. Because Profile Groups act as a filter within the Influencers & Brands tab, profiles outside of this range will not receive a score.
Apply Filters
The My Profile Groups section includes filters that allow you to focus your analysis on only the groups that are relevant to your research. Because Affinity and Uniqueness scores vary depending on the selected audience, filtering your Profile Groups helps reduce unnecessary information and allows you to focus on the comparisons that matter most. For example, if you're analyzing competitors within a single industry, you can display only those competitor Profile Groups while hiding unrelated groups.
Understanding the Heatmap Colors
The heatmap uses a normalized color scale to make differences between values easier to identify. Rather than assigning colors based on fixed values, each cell is shaded relative to the highest and lowest values contained within the current report.
The heatmap uses a gradient from white to blue:
- Lighter shades represent lower values.
- Darker shades represent higher values.
Because the scale is normalized for each report, the same numerical value may appear darker in one report and lighter in another depending on the overall range of values. This normalization helps highlight the most significant patterns within the current dataset.
Common Use Cases for Profile Groups
Profile Groups provide a flexible way to benchmark brands, influencers, or organizations across multiple audience clusters.
They can be used for a wide variety of research and marketing activities, including:
- Competitor analysis
- Influencer discovery
- Brand partnership evaluation
- Sponsorship research
- Industry benchmarking
- Audience affinity analysis
Because Profile Groups are completely customizable, they allow you to build comparisons that align with your specific research goals rather than relying solely on predefined rankings.
Example Use Case
Imagine you're an analyst for a global beverage company responsible for evaluating your brand against twenty competitors. After generating several Insights reports for audiences such as Young Parents, Active Retirees, and Business Professionals, you create a Profile Group containing your company alongside each competitor.
The Cluster Comparison heatmap allows you to immediately see which audience clusters demonstrate the strongest Affinity toward your brand and how your competitors perform within those same clusters.
This analysis may reveal underserved audiences where your brand already performs well, helping identify opportunities for future campaigns. Conversely, it may highlight audience segments where competitors have stronger relationships, allowing your marketing team to adjust messaging or partnership strategies accordingly.
The same workflow can be applied to influencer research. By creating Profile Groups containing influencers within a particular industry, you can quickly compare how each influencer resonates across your target audiences and identify the strongest partnership opportunities.