Using the Trend Chart

The Trend Chart shows how the profile of an online audience in a tag changes over time. Use this chart to measure whether people with your desired attributes are hitting your digital properties.  

To generate a Trend Chart, you need to have seen enough visitor activity on the tags on your website or digital ads.  You can add up to 5 Tags in your analysis; however, you will only be able to view data using the Trend Chart against one Tag at a time.  When analyzing an audience, hover on Analytics, then click Trend.  Select the insights you'd like to see against your Tag, and then you'll see the trend chart like below.  

Chart, Legend & Table

The chart will show a trend line for 3 of your chosen insights initially, you may choose an additional 5 insights to be trended on the chart. By default, the chart will show the 3 highest indexing insights in the final aggregation period.  

The insights table lets you select individual insights to add to the chart. Check the box to add the insight to the legend on the right and display it in the graph. Clicking the ‘x’ icon in the legend will remove the insight from the chart and from the legend. 

Mousing over the graph will trace the points for each of the visible insights. As you move forward and back across the graph, the legend in the right panel will dynamically update with the Index and Composition values for each insight as you hover over that point in time. The color of the trend line corresponds to the color in the legend for that insight.

Drop-Down Controls

At the top of the chart are 3 drop-down controls that will adjust the data you see in the chart.

1. Tag drop-down. If your analysis includes more than one tag, this is where you can choose for which tag you'd like to view data. By default, the first tag included in your analysis will be shown.

2. Date drop-down. By default, this chart will show you data monthly. You can adjust the time-frame to be monthly, weekly or quarterly by using the drop-down control at the top of the chart. 

3. Index vs Composition drop-down. By default, Index is shown and the 3 lines on the chart will be the first 3 insights that you have selected that have the highest index difference.  

The baseline is identified in the left panel when looking at the Tag card. You can edit the date range of the tag in the left panel. 

Collapsible Navigation

To give yourself more real-estate on the screen, you can collapse the left navigation by clicking the << arrow next to left panel where your audiences are shown. Expand it again by clicking on the same << icon.  

Caveat: using Tags and Tag Audiences as Baselines for a Trend Analysis 

When using a Tag or an audience which contains one or more Tags as a baseline for a trend analysis, the application treats time differently for the tag being trended and the tag/tag audience used as the baseline. In Audience Trend analysis, the audience for the tag being analyzed is broken up into slices according to when viewers saw the tag. However, a tag/tag audience used as a custom baseline is not broken up into time slices. The insights for the baseline audience are taken as a whole and then compared against the insights for the tag being analyzed within each interval.

For example, say the tag you are trending is ‘Home Page Visitors’ which has a First Seen/Last Seen of 4/1/2018 – 6/30/2018. You want to create a monthly Trend Analysis using this tag, and you want to use another tag called ‘Ad Clickers’ that had a First Seen/Last Seen of 1/1/2018 – 3/31/2018 as your custom baseline for the analysis. When you're analyzing an audience, the following happens:

1. The platform breaks up the Home Page Visitors audience into cookies that saw the page in April, May, and June
2. Reach values for all insights are calculated separately for the Home Page Visitors “April audience”, as well as the May and June audiences
3. To calculate index values, the reach values for the three Home Page Visitors monthly audiences are compared against the reach values for the Ad Clickers audience as a whole (note that the Ad Clickers Audience we used as a baseline is not broken up by month)
4. The index values are plotted on the graph.