Unused Signals Report

This report returns a frequency count of all the unused information collected on your inventory and sent to Audience Manager. To access this report, navigate to Analytics > Audience Reports > Other Reports > Unused Signals.

NOTE

If you see the message “You don’t have access to Audience Reports”, contact your Audience Manager consultant or Customer Care to provision the report for you.

Screenshot of Unused Signals Report

Overview

A signal is information from your website passed in to Audience Manager in the form of key-value pairs (e.g., color=blue, price>100, gender=female, etc.).

Unused signals consist of data that you collect but have not been mapped to a trait. The Unused Signals report shows data in a table by date, key, value, and frequency count. Any unmapped signal passed in to Audience Manager at least 100 times in a day qualifies for the Unused Signals report. Unused signals are stored for 45 days and then discarded.

Review this report to help identify orphaned signals that can be mapped to new or existing traits.

NOTE

Specify a key or value name in the search fields to limit results to specific records.

Use Cases

Examples Description

Examples	Description
Ensure Trait Uniformity or Add Related Values to a Single Key	Review the report to account for different value variations for a particular signal. For example, say you have a trait for the state "North Carolina" defined in a key-value pair as `c_state = North Carolina`. The report can help you find name variants and add those to the trait (e.g., `c_state = North Carolina, NC, N.C., NCarolina`). Alternatively, you could spot name variants with the report and replace those with a uniform value across all sites.
Create New Traits	Review the report to see what new values get passed in on a particular key. You may want to create new key-value pairs based on these new values. Note: Check the report bi-weekly for values that change frequently (e.g., shows, campaigns, celebrities, etc.).
Find Unmapped Values	Review the report for the number 1. The number 1 in an Unused Signals report represents a null value. This is not necessarily bad. It simply means that a particular key does not have an associated value mapping. When you see a lot of 1 values for an important variable, check with your site team to make sure all your pages are tagged correctly.

Ensure Trait Uniformity or Add Related Values to a Single Key

Review the report to account for different value variations for a particular signal.

For example, say you have a trait for the state "North Carolina" defined in a key-value pair as c_state = North Carolina. The report can help you find name variants and add those to the trait (e.g., c_state = North Carolina, NC, N.C., NCarolina). Alternatively, you could spot name variants with the report and replace those with a uniform value across all sites.

Create New Traits

Review the report to see what new values get passed in on a particular key. You may want to create new key-value pairs based on these new values.

Note: Check the report bi-weekly for values that change frequently (e.g., shows, campaigns, celebrities, etc.).

Find Unmapped Values

Review the report for the number 1. The number 1 in an Unused Signals report represents a null value. This is not necessarily bad. It simply means that a particular key does not have an associated value mapping. When you see a lot of 1 values for an important variable, check with your site team to make sure all your pages are tagged correctly.

Best Practices

Run and check the Unused Signals report:

After you create a trait or update trait rules. This helps ensure your traits and rules are set up properly. The number 1 in results indicates a new trait may not be configured correctly.
Bi-weekly or monthly. Scheduled reviews help ensure trait mappings are up-to-date.

NOTE

When searching for unused values in the report, please consider the following particularity. There is a difference in expression between the two examples below:

T(v=1 AND NOT (a=23))
T(v=1 AND (a!=23))
Both examples show a trait which contains two key-value pairs v and a. The first expression translates into: the trait contains key v with the value 1 AND NOT the key a with the value 23. The second expression contains key v with the value 1 AND the key a with the value NOT EQUAL 23.
Considering the two different expressions above, let’s say you search in the Unused Signals Report for the values that get passed on key a with any value different than 23, you’ll only obtain results in the first case because values for key were not sent AT ALL. In the second case, values different than 23 were sent so key a is not unused.