The Challenge

For companies serious about measuring promotional effectiveness, obtaining current, consistent, and granular promotion data is a necessary step towards better analytics. However, mitigating the challenges of large datasets, inconsistent formats, and frequently fluctuating data points can prove to be a daunting and ongoing battle.

Companies in need of promotion data can either manually acquire data or outsource their needs to a dedicated data provider. When evaluating a data solution, the following questions should be considered:

• What type of data points do I need?
• Does the coverage of the data provider meet my needs?
• How reliable and current is the provided data?
• How difficult is it to integrate with my existing data sources?
• Are there up-front costs, minimum monthly fees, or contractual time commitments?
• What is the cost, and how can I ensure that I am getting the best value?
• What if my needs change? How flexible is my data provider?

Data Delivery Using Discount Metrics

Discount Metrics’ Data Delivery is an easy-to-use service that automatically delivers current promotional information for over 140 retailers in the United States and Canada. Our data delivery service eliminates the challenges of dealing with large-scale data collection and time-intensive manual entry. With our delivery platform, you automatically receive weekly promotional data feeds with the promotions, stores, data points, and formats all customized to your organization’s individual needs. Our data is normalized so that all the information you receive is clear, consistent, and easy to use.

Our Data Delivery Service is flexible enough to adapt to your changing business needs. We work closely with you from the beginning to ensure that you get the data you need, when you need it.

• Real-Time Promotion Feeds - Designed to facilitate immediate and reliable implementation of real-time promotional data into various business intelligence and consumer search applications. Promotional data is collected at the store level, within hours of publication, and includes all relevant item and pricing information for the products on sale each week. This data is further normalized into persistent category, retailer, and brand entities, through a proprietary system developed by Discount Metrics.
• Historical Promotion Archive - Accessed via a web interface, subscribers are given access to our comprehensive archive of historical promotions and images. This interface is powered by our real-time promotional data feeds; archived promotions are normalized into persistent category, retailer, and brand entities to facilitate easy comparison and integration with external data sources.
• Circular Image Search - Search and compare page and product images of both current and historical circulars. This search is especially useful for those subscribers who need to compare art assets, page layouts, or even entire circulars for a specific retailer or product.
• Custom Categorization Engine - Discount Metrics’ categorization engine provides a rule-based web interface to facilitate quick and easy augmentation of all promotional information. Meta-data, custom categories, or other attributes can quickly and easily be added with our categorization engine.

Key Benefits

• Extensive Retailer Coverage - We provide store-level coverage for over 140 leading retailers in the US and Canada. For a detailed listing of retailers, contact our support specialists.
• Easy To Use - Data feeds are designed to work out of the box with your applications and analytics platforms. We standardize all data points to common formats so that you get a clear, consistent view no matter which retailer or store you are looking at. We also use standard data formats (CSV, JSON) to ensure maximum compatibility with a variety of applications.
• Flexible - Our data feeds are customized to your individual business needs, and can be changed to reflect your company’s changing priorities.
• Reliable & Current - Promotional information is collected within hours of a new circular being published, ensuring you always receive a current and accurate snapshot of promoted items for each week.
• Customized Solution - We work with you every step of the way to not only understand your requirements, but to develop custom solutions to help achieve your business goals.