Tracked Audiences: Audiences with a Goal

Tracked audiences answer a different question from a saved audience. Where a saved audience tells you who to contact, a tracked audience tells you whether what you are doing is working. You define a starting cohort and the outcome you want to see, and Dataro counts how many donors move from one to the other over time.

You will find them on the Tracked tab of the Audiences page at app.dataro.io/v3.

A saved audience is a list, and it answers who you should contact. A tracked audience is a list with a goal attached, so it answers how a program is going.

You define a starting cohort and the outcome you want those donors to reach, and Dataro counts how many convert from one to the other. It also shows you a trend line, so you can see how you are pacing rather than waiting for a single end-of-period figure.

• How many lapsed donors have we reactivated this year? Starting cohort is your lapsed file, target outcome is a gift.
• How many one-time donors upgraded to a mid-level gift? Starting cohort is single givers, target outcome is a gift at your mid-level threshold.
• How many donors increased their gift year over year? Starting cohort is last year's donors, target outcome is a higher gift this year.

These are the common ones, but the pattern generalizes: any movement from one definable state to another is trackable.

To set up a tracked audience:

1. Open the Tracked tab on the Audiences page.
2. Define your starting cohort, which is the group of donors you want to watch.
3. Define the desired outcome, which is the thing you want them to do.
4. Set the time interval you want to measure over.
5. Set how far back you want to look historically inside that window, and how far forward you want to project.
6. Save. Dataro produces a trend line so you can see conversion accumulating rather than waiting for a single end-of-period number.

Tracked audiences track across your entire donor file rather than at an individual campaign level. If you are running several campaigns to the same cohort of lapsed donors, you can see how many reactivated overall, but not which specific campaign drove each conversion.

Campaign-level attribution is a known gap and it is on the roadmap, so plan your measurement around what is available today. If campaign-level attribution matters for a particular program, we recommend using a static saved audience for each send, which gives you fixed lists to compare afterward.

• Lapsed donor reactivation across a year. This is the most common use, because reactivation is slow and a single end-of-year number hides the pacing information you need mid-year.
• One-time to recurring conversion over time. This tells you whether a conversion program is building over time or staying flat.
• Mid-level or major-donor upgrade cadence. This helps when the question is how fast donors are upgrading rather than how many have upgraded, because the trend line shows the rate.

Can I turn an existing saved audience into a tracked audience?

A tracked audience needs a target outcome and a time window, which a saved audience does not carry, so you set it up as a tracked audience with its own definition. You can use the same starting criteria you used for the saved audience.

Does tracking tell me which campaign caused the conversion?

Not today. Tracking runs across your whole donor file rather than per campaign, so you get the overall conversion count for the cohort. If you need per-campaign attribution, use a static saved audience per send as a workaround.

How far back can I look?

You choose how historical you want to look inside your chosen window, and how far forward. That means you can backfill a tracked audience against past data rather than waiting from today onward.

Is a tracked audience something I mail, or just something I read?

Mostly something you read, because its job is measurement. If you want to contact the people in the cohort, build or reuse a saved audience for the send and let the tracked audience report on the result.