Audience Trends

The Audience Trends dashboard tracks how your audiences change over time. Monitor audience size, growth and shrink rates, membership change velocity, and historical snapshots to understand audience dynamics and measure the impact of campaigns, product changes, and market shifts.

What Audience Trends Show

Every time an audience is evaluated (during a sync run or a scheduled evaluation), SignalSmith records the member count and a snapshot of the membership set. Audience Trends aggregates this data into time-series visualizations and summary metrics.

Key Metrics

Metric	Description
Current Size	Number of members in the audience as of the most recent evaluation
Growth Rate	Percentage increase in audience size over the selected time window
Shrink Rate	Percentage decrease in audience size over the selected time window
Net Change	Absolute change in member count (positive = growth, negative = shrink)
Change Velocity	Rate of membership changes per evaluation (adds + removes per run)
Churn Rate	Percentage of members who exited the audience in the selected window
New Member Rate	Percentage of current members who entered the audience in the selected window

Reading the Dashboard

Audience Size Over Time

The primary chart shows audience member count plotted over time. Each data point corresponds to an audience evaluation. Use this to:

Spot trends — Is the audience growing, shrinking, or stable?
Identify inflection points — When did growth accelerate or a decline begin?
Correlate with events — Compare audience size changes against campaign launches, product releases, or seasonal patterns.

Growth and Shrink Analysis

Below the size chart, a breakdown shows the composition of each change:

Members Added — New members who entered the audience since the previous evaluation
Members Removed — Members who exited the audience since the previous evaluation
Members Retained — Members who remained in the audience across evaluations

This decomposition reveals whether an audience is “churning” (high adds and removes but stable size) or genuinely growing/shrinking.

Membership Change Velocity

Velocity measures the total rate of change (adds + removes) per evaluation, regardless of direction. A high-velocity audience has a lot of membership turnover, which can impact:

Sync volume — High-velocity audiences generate more sync operations
Destination costs — More API calls to add and remove members
Campaign targeting stability — Members may enter and exit before a campaign reaches them

Historical Snapshots

SignalSmith stores audience evaluation snapshots in your warehouse’s audit schema. You can query these directly for custom analysis:

SELECT
  evaluated_at,
  member_count,
  members_added,
  members_removed
FROM CDP_AUDIT.AUDIENCE_EVALUATIONS
WHERE audience_id = 'aud_abc123'
ORDER BY evaluated_at DESC

Common Use Cases

Measuring Campaign Impact

Compare audience trends before and after a campaign:

Navigate to Insights > Audience Trends
Select the target audience (e.g., “Active Users”)
Set the time window to span the campaign period
Look for size changes that correlate with campaign start and end dates

If the audience grows during the campaign and stabilizes after, the campaign likely drove new qualifying behavior. If it shrinks after the campaign ends, the campaign may have temporarily inflated the segment.

Monitoring Audience Decay

Some audiences naturally shrink over time as members stop qualifying (e.g., “Purchased in the last 30 days” will lose members who haven’t purchased recently). Trends help you:

Set expectations — Understand the natural decay rate so you can plan for list attrition
Trigger re-engagement — If a high-value audience is decaying faster than expected, it may signal the need for retention campaigns
Adjust criteria — If an audience shrinks below a useful threshold, consider broadening the filter conditions

Identifying Anomalies

Sudden spikes or drops in audience size often indicate data issues rather than real changes:

Anomaly	Possible Cause	Investigation
Sudden 50%+ drop	Source data issue (table truncated, schema change)	Check the source model and recent data loads
Sudden 50%+ spike	Filter condition bug or new data backfill	Review the audience filter and recent model changes
Size drops to zero	Source connection failure or query error	Check the audience evaluation logs for errors
Wild oscillation	Non-deterministic query (e.g., relying on `CURRENT_TIMESTAMP` in joins)	Review the model SQL for time-sensitive logic

Comparing Multiple Audiences

Select multiple audiences to plot their trends on the same chart. This is useful for:

A/B segment comparison — Compare how two variations of an audience criteria perform
Funnel analysis — Track audiences that represent different stages of a customer journey (e.g., “Signed Up” → “First Purchase” → “Repeat Buyer”)
Portfolio monitoring — See all your key audiences at a glance to spot which are growing and which are declining

API Endpoint

GET /api/v1/insights/audience-trends

Returns audience size time series and change metrics.

Query Parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
`audience_id`	string	Filter to a specific audience (optional, returns all if omitted)
`window`	string	Time window: `7d`, `30d`, `90d`, `1y` (default: `30d`)
`granularity`	string	Data point granularity: `run`, `daily`, `weekly` (default: `daily`)

Response Fields:

Field	Type	Description
`audience_id`	string	Audience identifier
`audience_name`	string	Audience display name
`current_size`	integer	Most recent member count
`data_points`	array	Time series of `{ timestamp, member_count, added, removed }`
`growth_rate`	float	Percentage growth over the window
`shrink_rate`	float	Percentage shrink over the window
`change_velocity`	float	Average adds + removes per evaluation

Audiences — Create and manage audience segments
Audience Overlap — Compare membership between audiences
Activation Coverage — See where audiences are being activated
Sync Health — Monitor sync execution health

Sync Health Activation Coverage