Understanding grace period and initial audience size

Audiences are an important part of delivering the best content possible to visitors. When creating content, you want to tailor that content to the audience.

Knowing an audience’s size is also important. In most scenarios, you want to focus effort on large audiences. For example, if you have a weekend audience with one million visitors, and a weekday audience with 5,000 visitors, you normally dedicate more effort to providing content appropriate for the weekend audience, and a bit less effort to the weekday audience.

Brightspot calculates audience size based on data acquired from Tealium, updating that number daily as a rolling total over the grace period. For example, if the grace period is 2 months, Brightspot computes the audience size on December 15 as the number of visitors during the period October 15 through December 15.

To enable rolling audience counts for Tealium-based audiences, you need to configure two items:

• Initial audience size—An estimate of the audience’s actual size used during the initial grace period.

• Grace period—Period of time during which Brightspot computes rolling audience totals based on actual Tealium counts.

  

Referring to the previous illustration—

• During the grace period (months 1 and 2) the estimated audience size is 100,000.
• At the end of month 3, for the previous two months, Brightspot detected approximately 80,000 visitors.
• At the end of month 4, for the previous two months, Brightspot detected 110,000 visitors.
• At the end of month 5, for the previous two months, Brightspot detected 140,000 visitors.

Consider using the following guidelines when determining the grace period and initial audience size:

• Initial audience size:

  • Use the number indicated in your Tealium Audience Dashboard.
  • Use the size of similar existing audiences. If you already have a stable weekend audience using mobile devices, its size may be a good guess for a new weekend audience using laptops.
  • Use a competitive analysis from analytics providers.
  • Use the number of searches for terms in your site.

• Grace period:

  • A large number of visitors typically justifies a short grace period; a small number of visitors requires a longer grace period to achieve a steady state.
  • Try to be consistent with your grace period across audiences, so you can effectively compare and contrast their audience sizes.