Unused Signals Report 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.
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.
Use Cases
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.
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.).
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.
- 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.
Bulk Trait Creation
Contact your Partner Solutions representative if you need to bulk create a lot of traits based on data obtained from the Unused Signals report.