Hi Runa,
I was able to speak with the product team to verify when this message appears. Essentially, it appears when there isn't a number to be shown. This could be because the audience has no data yet, or it could be that the system just hasn't updated since receiving the data.
With Historical Audiences shared via an Analytics segment, your audience may show collecting data for 24-48 hours. This is because data from Analytics takes 24-48 hours to be exported, imported, and updated in the UI. With Real-time audiences created in the Audience Library interface, there should only be ~30 min delay from the initial creation.
Keep in mind, both of the scenarios above are assuming that the audience has qualified visitors. Obviously, if your Analytics segment contains zero visitors, Audience Library is going to show "collecting data" until the Analytics segment receives a qualified visitor and the 24-48 hours have passed. If your real-time audience contains zero visitors upon creation, it will show collecting data until it receives it's first qualified visitor and the Audience Library UI updates.
The Audience Library UI updates once per day in the morning time PST. This does not mean your audience updates only once a day, it's simply the reporting UI.
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For Troubleshooting:
Historical Audiences
- Ensure that your Analytics segment contains visitors in the Analytics UI
- Ensure the segment doesn't contain more than 20 Million unique visitors - Documentation
- Ensure that 48 hours have passed since the segment was shared
- If you've checked the above and your audience is still showing "collecting data", contact Customer Care. They will verify that the data is flowing on the backend
Real-Time Audiences
- Ensure that 45 min has passed since the last modification of the audience conditions
- In a private/incognito browser window, run through the steps to qualify for the audience while verifying the Analytics beacons contain the required values
- Either wait until the reporting UI is updated the following morning or create a Target activity that is targeted at this real-time audience
- If the UI still shows "collecting data" or if the target activity isn't being triggered, contact Customer Care and ensure you have server-side forwarding enabled for the tracking servers being used in your implementation.
I hope this helps. Please let me know If I can clarify anything.
Cheers,
Jantzen