Sally Martin

Census could be referring to U.S. census regions or divisions.  But if census is used in reference to a specific retailer, it means Nielsen/IRI receives data for ALL that retailer’s stores. So there is no need to project from a sample – they have everything and can simply report it out without adjustment.  An example […]

CRMA is IRI’s term for the overall geographic area in which a retailer operates and is typically used to compare performance of a retailer and its competition.  The retailer’s own stores make up it’s Trading Area while the CRMA includes all stores physically located within that geography, defined by counties.  The CRMA encompasses both a retailer and its competition. […]

A database fact/measure that you should not sum over time or market or product is often called “non-additive”.  This is a common database term, not specific to CPG data.  Dollar and unit sales are both additive.  By contrast, distribution and price are non-additive.  For example, if one upc has 30% distribution and another upc also […]

Penetration is a panel data measure.  It is the % of households that have purchased a product, or shopped in a certain channel or retailer.   Higher is better and 100% penetration is as good as it gets.  In Nielsen the fact is called Item Penetration (for specific categories/brand/products) or Shopper Penetration (for channels/retailers).  In […]

A Promoted Product Group (sometimes abbreviated as PPG) is a set of UPCs that are priced and promoted together. This usually contains items of the same or similar size. When analyzing trade promotions, it is usually most helpful to look at incremental volume at the PPG level, not at the individual UPC level.