Skip to main content
Overlap is the set of people who appear in two or more channels at the same time. The Audience Overlap chart in Path visualizes this with a Venn diagram comparing two to five channels at once.
When the same person registers through your newsletter and a partner referral and shows up in both channel rosters, that’s overlap. Path measures it so you can tell apart durable shared audiences from one-off intersections, and decide where to invest.

​
Why overlap matters

Overlap answers three questions:
  • Channel redundancy. If two channels share 80% of their audience, you’re paying twice to reach the same people. One of them may be redundant.
  • Unique reach. A channel’s true value is the audience it brings that no one else brings. The portion of a channel that doesn’t overlap is its unique contribution.
  • Audience concentration risk. If most of your audience comes through a single channel with no overlap with anything else, losing that channel costs you the audience.

​
How Path computes overlap

A person is “in” a channel if they have been attributed to it, via direct import, a connected source like Eventbrite or Luma, or any other channel link. When you select two channels in the Audience Overlap view, Path counts the people who appear in both. With three or more channels, it counts every region of the Venn diagram: people in just A, in A and B, in all three, and so on. Counts reflect the current state of your audience. The chart reflects new imports and connected sources the next time you open it.

​
Reading the chart

Open Path → Analytics → Channel Audience and pick two to five channels from the toggle row. The Venn diagram and stats panel update together:
  • Each circle is one channel; its size scales with the channel’s total audience.
  • Overlap regions show how many people sit at each intersection. Hover or click a region to see exactly which people fall there.
  • Stats panel breaks out totals, unique-to-channel counts, and shared counts for the current selection.
To compare more than five channels, switch the selection. Five is the maximum the Venn diagram renders cleanly.

​
Edge cases

  • Just one channel selected. The chart needs at least two channels to draw overlap. Add another from the toggle row.
  • No overlap between selected channels. Circles render side by side with no intersection. That’s a real signal: your channels are reaching distinct audiences.
  • Same person on three channels. They count in the all-three intersection region; the chart does not double-count them in pairwise regions.