Overview
Follow this guide to learn how to use the Interests tab in an Audiense Insights report.
The Interests tab helps you understand the topics, industries, hobbies, and themes that are most relevant to your audience. Using Audiense's proprietary interest model, these insights are organized according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Content Taxonomy, providing a standardized way to analyze audience interests across multiple marketing and advertising platforms.
By comparing your audience against a selected baseline, you can identify which interests are most distinctive and use those insights to improve audience segmentation, campaign targeting, content creation, and partnership opportunities.
Understanding the Interests Tab
The Interests tab provides a ranked list of the interest categories that are most relevant to your audience. Unlike simple keyword analysis, Audiense combines multiple behavioral signals to estimate audience interests and organizes those insights using the IAB Content Taxonomy, an industry-standard classification system used across digital advertising platforms.
Each interest category represents the percentage of your audience associated with that topic, allowing you to compare those values against your selected baseline and quickly identify the interests that make your audience unique.
How Interests Are Calculated
Audiense determines audience interests by combining two primary behavioral signals from X (formerly Twitter):
- User-generated posts
- Followed accounts and content
These signals are analyzed using Audiense's proprietary algorithms and then categorized according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Content Taxonomy. The resulting interest categories represent the estimated percentage of your audience that demonstrates interest in each topic. This standardized approach makes it easier to apply audience insights across advertising platforms such as Google Ads, Meta Ads, and X Ads.
Understanding Interest Rankings
The Interests table displays audience interests ranked from the highest to the lowest percentage of audience members associated with each category.
Each row contains:
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Rank | The position of the interest within the overall ranking. |
| Interest Category | The IAB interest category identified for the audience. |
| Audience vs. Baseline | The percentage of your audience associated with the interest compared to the selected baseline. |
Although the IAB taxonomy organizes interests into multiple hierarchical levels, Audiense calculates every interest category independently across the full audience. This allows broad categories such as Music to appear alongside more specific interests such as Opera, providing visibility into both general interests and niche topics.
Using Interest Categories
Interest categories can support a variety of audience research and marketing activities.
Common use cases include:
- Developing campaign messaging
- Refining audience targeting
- Building audience segments
- Identifying partnership opportunities
- Supporting media planning
- Discovering new audience interests
Because many advertising platforms also use the IAB taxonomy, these interest categories can often be translated directly into campaign targeting strategies. It is important to remember that one of the primary inputs for interest calculation is user-generated content. Some topics naturally generate more public discussion than others. Areas such as news, sports, politics, and entertainment are often highly visible on social media, while more personal interests may generate fewer public signals.
Filter Interest Categories
The Interests tab allows you to filter the results by Category Group. Filtering helps narrow the list to a particular area of interest while reducing unrelated results. For example, selecting the Sports category displays only sports-related interest categories, making it easier to analyze specific themes within your audience.
Note: Applying a filter does not change the overall ranking of the interests. Rankings always represent the original position within the complete list of interest categories.
Export Interest Categories
You can export the Interests table as an XLSX file.
The exported workbook includes:
- Interest categories
- Primary category names
- Secondary category names for additional context
Although the export does not preserve the IAB hierarchy, it allows you to organize, sort, group, and analyze the data outside of Audiense using spreadsheet software or external reporting tools.
Recent Visualization Updates
The Interests tab was updated in April 2024 with several enhancements designed to improve usability and make the data easier to explore.
These updates include:
- A transition from the previous nested view to a simplified flat list.
- The addition of Category Group filtering.
- An enhanced XLSX export for external analysis and activation.
Old View
New View
These improvements make it easier to:
- Identify your audience's top interests.
- Explore related categories.
- Filter interests by theme.
- Export data for additional analysis.
Planned Enhancements
Audiense plans to continue expanding the functionality of the Interests tab.
Upcoming enhancements include:
- Uniqueness scoring
- Interest ranking improvements
Additional details will be provided as these features become available.