Situation: After a big holiday spend, our client asked us if it was possible to get spend breakdown by DMA* to see where their consumers were. They saw that spend in New York was up significantly Year Over Year, and wanted to understand spend across various DMAs, comprehensive of all platforms. New York has a large amount of Client’s locations, so a higher concentration of spend there was expected, but Client wanted to identify pressure points in other areas of the country.
Objective:
Create a reporting view that can drill down to geographic levels while encompassing all platforms and channels
Methodology:
First, we created a geography reference table that went down to the zip code level. Next, we defined standardized platform naming for all geographies to integrate each of the API DMA outputs. Then we built a lookup to bucket our client’s specific DMAs to isolate their reporting regions. Using this newly standardized dataset that included all possible geographical results to provide clean DMA outputs, Spend could now be merged from all platforms to group where the user was located when the Spend occurred.
Results:
Visibility on overall spend for DMAs with Client locations vs DMAs without Client locations. This helps Client better understand the relationship between location-level conversions and support from digital marketing efforts. Ultimately, the tool allows us to look at data a little differently, which can be helpful for any brands looking to assess performance by DMA.
* DMA (Designated Market Area) regions are the geographic areas in the United States in which local television viewing is measured by Nielsen.
