Audience insights

Understand how to use Insights in Customer Studio to explore metrics, analyze trends, and power downstream targeting and enrichment workflows.

Learning Objectives

After reading this article, you will be able to:

• Calculate and interpret the size of an audience.
• Preview individual audience members before syncing.
• Explore audience overlaps to ensure clean campaign segmentation.
• Use audience breakdowns to understand the distribution of traits and metrics.
• Navigate and use the Show insights panel during audience definition.

Overview

Understand and validate the size, composition, and characteristics of your audience using Insights. While defining or editing an audience in Customer Studio, you can view summary metrics, compare overlaps, and break down key traits inside the visual builder.

In addition to audience-level insights, Customer Studio includes Campaign Intelligence—a suite of tools for deeper analysis across campaigns, including insights charts, metrics, funnels, and split tests.

Access Audience Insights

You can access insights while creating or editing an audience in two places:

• In the audience creation flow, during the Define audience step

  

• In the audience editor, under the Definition tab

  

Click the Show insights button in the top-right of the filter builder toolbar.

Calculate audience size

To see how many users match your audience filters, click Calculate size. The audience size is shown at the top of the builder and is updated when filters change or a sync occurs.

You can also calculate the size of specific filter groups by clicking Calculate size within any top-level AND block. This helps you understand how each filter group contributes to—or reduces—overall audience membership.

Member preview

Click the size preview count to more closely inspect the list of members who currently meet your audience criteria and ensure you're building the correct audience. If you've chosen to redact any columns in your model configuration, they are redacted here.

Clicking on a particular member will open the member details panel to give you an even deeper look at your audience members.

Audience overlaps

With many audiences syncing simultaneously, it can be difficult to ensure that end users aren't being targeted by multiple campaigns.

Audience overlaps help you validate the composition of your audiences by letting you compare one audience against another. You can find audience overlaps within the Show insights panel when defining your audience.

Select a previously created audience from the dropdown to compare the audiences.

For more information, check out the Audience Overlaps blog post.

Audience breakdowns

Breakdowns help quickly check your audience segmentation and ensure the audience meets your needs by enabling you to better understand the distribution of specific characteristics within audiences.

Breakdowns help you explore how an audience is distributed across key traits or metrics—for example, how many users fall into each region, loyalty tier, or spending bucket.

To create a breakdown:

1. Open the Show insights panel.
2. Scroll to the Breakdowns tab.
3. Choose a metric or property, such as:
   • Saved metrics (custom metrics from your workspace)
   • Events (e.g., Bookings)
   • Relations (e.g., Preferred Hotel)
   • User properties (e.g., Region, Language)
   • Traits (custom trait columns)

You can also group by a user property (e.g., group Total Bookings by Region) and choose an aggregation type (e.g., count, average).

Breakdowns are shown as charts within the panel, helping you visually validate whether your audience reflects your desired segmentation.

Numerical metrics

When you select a numerical property or a model-based metric (e.g. events), you can optionally select a non-numerical user property to group the metric by.

Except in the case of Saved metrics, if no Group by option is selected, the chart will group by the metric itself.

Depending on the type of numerical metric you select, you are able to choose additional options on what to view in your breakdown.

Further exploration

To explore a breakdown in more depth, you can open it in Charts to apply additional filters and groupings, explore different visualizations, and save the chart for future reference.

For more information, check out the Audience Breakdowns blog post.

FAQ

Is our insight data saved by Hightouch?

No, Hightouch never saves your data.

Do Breakdowns and Overlaps reflect if an audience belongs to a priority list?

Yes-the insight tools take audience priority into account.