Insights by Qloo: Defining essential terms and functionality

Understanding the power behind Qloo’s Insights platform is key to unlocking its full potential for your business. With so many valuable features at your disposal, we’ve created this guide to help you get familiar with the language of Insights. From affinity scores to heatmaps, each concept plays a crucial role in delivering the personalized recommendations and deep audience insights that set Qloo apart. Use this glossary as a quick reference to dive deeper into how our platform works, and how it can work for you. And if you still need help or clarity about something, be sure to reach out—we’re here to help! 

Audience: An audience in Qloo adds an extra layer of detail to your base query, helping you narrow down your insights with greater precision. For instance, if you’re exploring the interests of a 30- to 34-year-old who likes Beyoncé, you can apply an audience filter like “Foodie” to get more specific results. Qloo’s audiences cover a wide range, from interests like Health and Beauty or Cooking to identities such as LGBTQ+ or Christianity, allowing you to refine your findings and target more focused segments.

Affinity: Qloo’s affinity score helps you understand the connections between different interests, behaviors, and demographics. Think of it as a guide that shows how closely related two things are, like how likely a certain audience is to prefer a particular brand or product. The score, ranging from 0 to 100, offers a quick snapshot of how strong that connection is—a higher score means a stronger link. Behind the scenes, advanced AI and machine learning models crunch a wide variety of data to produce these scores. With this valuable insight, businesses can create more personalized and engaging experiences that resonate with the right audiences, both locally and globally.

Base Query: The base query in Insights — the colorful sentence at the top of your dashboard — allows users to define a specific target audience by combining information like demographic details, location, and interests. It allows you to create a detailed profile, such as a 30 to 34-year-old woman living in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn who enjoys running, the New Yorker, and bluegrass music. With this foundation, businesses can gain deeper insights into the preferences of this target audience and create more personalized, relevant strategies.

Dashboard: A dashboard in Qloo is a user-friendly interface where you can generate insights for a target audience using tables and heatmaps. Within the dashboard, you can create and customize tables and heatmaps based on specific base queries. You also have the flexibility to rename your dashboard, clone it for further exploration, or share it with others for collaboration or viewing, making it a central tool for organizing and analyzing your audience insights.

Entity: Entities in Qloo’s world are the building blocks—people, places, things, and interests that matter. Each entity is a thread in the vast web of connections Qloo maps out, representing something notable that our system recognizes and understands. Qloo uses its Taste AI technology to uncover how these entities relate to one another and the broader cultural landscape. It’s through these entities that Qloo creates a deeper understanding of what drives preferences and behaviors. Qloo’s entity catalog currently contains over 3.7 billion entities. 

Explore: The Explore feature on a dashboard provides a summary overview of outputs based on your base query, offering a high-level snapshot of your data. It also includes AI-powered analyses that give deeper insights into the results, helping you quickly understand patterns, trends, and connections within your audience. Explore offers an intuitive way to dive into the data and uncover key takeaways without manually sifting through individual details.

Geofence: A geofence is an invisible boundary created around a specific real-world location, allowing you to gather insights about consumer preferences and behavior within that designated area. By setting these virtual boundaries within Insights, you can analyze results within specific geofenced regions, helping businesses understand how preferences and interests vary from one location to another, down to precise neighborhoods or even city blocks.

Heatmap: Qloo’s heatmaps are generated using the pre-calculated affinity and popularity scores that measure how strongly an entity is connected to a specific geographic area. The affinity score shows how closely the entity aligns with local preferences, while the popularity score ranks the entity’s signal compared to others in the same region. By calculating these scores across different geohashes, or geographic blocks, the heatmap provides a detailed, data-driven view of where consumer interest is concentrated. Warmer colors indicate areas with stronger signals, helping businesses visualize and act on regional trends.

A heatmap has three buttons allowing you to customize the results. Each button generates a unique heatmap: 

• ‍Magnet Symbol (Affinity-Rank Score): This measures how well an entity (like a brand or product) performs compared to itself in the area of interest. Areas where the entity’s affinity score is above the median (.5) are shown in red, while those below the median are shown in blue. This helps visualize where the entity is performing better or worse across different regions.
• ‍Arrow Symbol (Popularity Score): This indicates the popularity of an entity within a specific area by comparing it to other entities in the same location. When the entity’s popularity score is above the median (.5), the area will be shown in red, highlighting where it has a stronger presence compared to other entities in that location.
• ‍List Symbol (Affinity in Geospatial Context): This compares an entity to other entities within a geographic location, both locally and globally. The affinity score provides a normalized measure of how much interest people in a specific location have in an entity, compared to other entities with signals in that area. This helps assess the relative level of interest across different locations from both a local and broader perspective.

Modifiers: Modifiers allow you to add more specificity to your base query, helping you refine and narrow down your audience profile. Rather than completely changing the original query, modifiers are mostly additive—they let you tweak details like age, gender, location, or interests to build on the initial audience. For example, if you’re exploring an audience in East Austin that likes comedy, you can use modifiers to specify a different age group or add a new interest like live music. This makes it easier to hone in on particular segments while keeping the core of your original query intact.

Panel: A panel is the feature within a dashboard that allows you to display specific insights, either as a table or a heatmap. It serves as the workspace where you can view insights and can apply modifiers to adjust the base query, helping you explore different aspects of your audience. Panels give you the flexibility to refine your data and visualize it in a way that fits your needs, whether you’re looking for detailed tables or geographic trends.

Popularity: Qloo’s popularity score represents how an entity ranks within its category based on overall interest. Measured on a scale from 0 to 100, the higher the score, the more popular the entity is compared to others in the same group. For instance, a music artist with a score of 98 is more popular than 98% of all other artists. It’s an easy way to understand which entities are leading in their category and gaining the most attention among consumers.

Table: A table displays the output of your base query, presenting key details about the result entities. You can view important metrics such as the entity’s name, affinity score, trend line, and popularity, along with additional relevant information like websites and product offerings. It organizes all this data in a clear, structured format, making it easy to analyze and compare different entities within your query.

Taste AI: Qloo’s Taste AI is the engine behind our powerful Insights platform, driving personalized recommendations by uncovering the deeper connections between people’s tastes and interests. Unlike typical recommendation engines, Taste AI makes cross-domain predictions—linking seemingly unrelated preferences across areas like food, music, travel, and more. By analyzing anonymized user interactions and entity data with machine learning, it understands not just what people like, but why. This privacy-first AI creates insightful connections without processing any personal information, ensuring businesses can offer personalized experiences that resonate on a cultural level while maintaining user anonymity.

‍Trend: A trend line shows how an entity’s popularity shifts over time compared to others in the same category. It’s based on a six-month average, giving you a clear sense of whether an entity is gaining or losing interest. The higher the trendline, the more it’s rising in popularity relative to its peers. This can help you track how consumer tastes and preferences evolve, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve with timely insights.