Conversion Profiles

A conversion profile is a named bundle of choices — containment mode, resolution policy, circle mode, weighting, and (where relevant) a privacy rule — that together answer one stated intent. Profiles exist so that "convert this to H3" is never an underspecified request: naming a profile forces every downstream consumer to know, without re-deriving it, what guarantees hold and what tradeoffs were accepted. They are defaults for an intent, not universal truths; every profile below states the case where it is the wrong choice.

The seven profiles

partition_stable

Mutually-exclusive administrative partitions — every location belongs to exactly one region.

coverage_complete

Delivery/serviceable-area coverage where missing ground is worse than spilling over.

measurement_weighted

Reporting and analytics that apportion values across many-to-many cell/region relationships.

experiment_conservative

Geo-experiments that must minimize treatment/control contamination.

proximity_full_reach

Maximizing reach around a set of cells or points, with overlap accepted and reported.

platform_limit_optimized

Fitting a target set within a platform's target-count and minimum-radius limits.

privacy_safe

Aggregation that avoids small-cell re-identification and sparse-audience exposure.

Per-profile detail

partition_stable

Containment mode is center: a cell belongs to a region if and only if the cell's center falls inside it. Resolution policy is a single uniform resolution across the whole partition. No weighting is applied. This guarantees a deterministic, single assignment per cell with no double counting — the property most rollup and budgeting logic assumes. The tradeoff is boundary undercoverage: cells whose center sits just outside a region are dropped from it, and a region narrower than one cell at the chosen resolution can receive zero cells. Recommended metrics: coverage_ratio and underreach_ratio per region.

coverage_complete

Containment mode is intersect: any cell touching the source polygon with positive intersection area qualifies. Resolution should be fine enough that the resulting overreach is acceptable for the use case. No weighting. This guarantees every point of the source polygon is covered by at least one cell — the property serviceable-area and reach use cases need. The tradeoff is boundary overreach and overlap with neighboring regions, since intersect-mode cells are not mutually exclusive. Recommended metrics: coverage_ratio, overreach_ratio, jaccard.

measurement_weighted

Containment mode is intersect, but the output is the full weighted crosswalk table — every (cell, region) overlap retained with its intersection area and coverage fraction — rather than a single assignment. Resolution should match the measurement grain, and the weighted table must be kept, not collapsed to an argmax. Weighting can be area, population, audience, or inventory, applied via the coverage fraction as an apportionment factor. This guarantees a complete many-to-many overlap record; the tradeoff is materially more storage and the need to source and version whatever weight is applied. Recommended metrics: coverage_ratio, jaccard.

experiment_conservative

Containment mode is full (cell fully inside the source polygon) combined with the inscribed circle for any point+radius execution; resolution policy favors coarser cells or explicit buffering to create non-touching experimental units. No weighting. This guarantees executed geometry is a subset of the intended unit — no spill into neighboring units, which is the property a treatment/control design depends on. The tradeoff is deliberate underreach: boundary area and cell corners are left unserved by construction. Recommended metrics: underreach_ratio, uncovered_area_m2.

proximity_full_reach

Circle mode is circumscribed; resolution policy is one outer circle per cell in the target set. No weighting. This guarantees cell subset-of circle — complete coverage of every target cell. The tradeoff is that neighboring circles overlap, producing duplicate eligibility that must be reported via duplicate_eligibility_area_m2, not hidden. Recommended metrics: overreach_ratio, duplicate_eligibility_area_m2.

platform_limit_optimized

Containment mode is intersect, circle mode is circumscribed where circles are needed; resolution policy is to compact the cell set and coarsen iteratively until the result is under the platform's maxTargets cap and above its minRadius floor. No weighting. This guarantees the result respects the named platform's target-count and minimum-radius constraints — the property that determines whether a buy can even be submitted. The tradeoff is that coarsening enlarges the effective footprint, trading precision for platform compatibility. Recommended metrics: overreach_ratio, coverage_ratio.

privacy_safe

Containment mode is center; resolution policy enforces both a minimum physical cell size and a minimum audience threshold, degrading resolution and suppressing sparse cells as needed. No weighting. Privacy rule: k-anonymity threshold, sparse-cell suppression, and a minimum aggregation window applied together, not any one alone. This guarantees no cell is reported below the configured audience or area threshold. The tradeoff is resolution degradation and suppression reducing granularity, sometimes substantially in sparse geographies. Recommended metrics: coverage_ratio, alongside the suppression count itself (cells dropped, not just cells kept).

Choosing among them

The profiles are not mutually exclusive stages of one pipeline — a single campaign typically needs more than one. A privacy_safe audience definition might feed a proximity_full_reach execution for delivery, measured against a measurement_weighted crosswalk for reporting, with an experiment_conservative subset carved out for a lift study. Naming which profile governs which stage of a pipeline is what keeps the choices auditable; using one resolution and one containment rule for all of them, because it happened to work for the first stage, is the failure mode this page exists to prevent.