I have an Audience Spectrum license: why are some of my customer records profiled as ‘Unclassified’ & ‘Unmatched.’

If you have an Audience Spectrum license subscription alongside Audience Answers Ticketing, the customer records in your ticketing system will be tagged with an individual Audience Spectrum segment and subsegment type.  

However, you might see some customer records marked as ‘Unclassified’ & ‘Unmatched.’ We would expect to see this in all databases so this is not an error with the service or your system, and refers to the occasion when the record cannot be assigned an Audience Spectrum segment and subsegment.  

The overview below explains the definition of both these tags. 

• Unmatched: An unmatched record is a customer whose address is not valid and has, therefore, not been recognised when being matched to the Household Directory. This could be for a number of reasons, including incomplete address (i.e. postcode only or 1st line of the address field empty), incorrect/non-existent address, commercial/business address, overseas address, new build not yet recognised, or demolished no longer recognised. 
• Unclassified: An unclassified record is a customer whose address is valid and has been successfully matched to the Experian Household Directory. However, there is currently not enough data on the household to prescribe them with an Audience Spectrum segment. This is data from a number of sources that are used to create Audience Spectrum and which determine the assignment of an Audience Spectrum Segment & Sub Segment to each UK household. If at a later date, the data required to assign a segment becomes available, the record will be updated.  

If you have any further questions on this process, please don't hesitate to let us know at answers@theaudienceagency.org