Data Profiling

Question 1

What columns are mandatory in product data file?

Answer 1

Item - unique ID used in your system to identify item

Title - the name of your product

Category - should be a hierarchy. ex: Electronics>Phones>iPhone

Question 2

Does column order matter when sending sales data file?

Answer 2

Yes. Columns can be in any order, but they must be sent in the same order every time.

Question 3

If there is an error in the sales file, will the good records still be loaded and the bad ones omitted?

Answer 3

No, it is all or nothing with the load.

Question 4

Is it possible to have the unit item price and the number of purchased items (quantity) in the sales file? Would SI calculate the total sales amount based on these?

Answer 4

No, the files we load must contain the total price for items (ex: 2 items totaling $5)

Question 5

What happens with contacts who have purchases which are negative (refunded items) or zero (free items)?

Answer 5

They will be loaded as leads. If they are not identifiable (cannot be matched with any Emarsys contacts), they will be ‘generated leads’ with ‘Unknown’ lead source and ‘New Lead’ lifecycle status.

Question 6

What happens if we get a purchase without a product ID in the sales data file? Will this be loaded as an unknown item?

Answer 6

No, the load will fail. We only create ‘unknown products’ when the product ID for an order is missing from the product catalogue.

Question 7

What happens if there is no item (Product ID) in the product data file?

Answer 7

Loading fails

Question 8

What happens if the item is not unique within a single file

Answer 8

Loading fails

Question 9

What happens if multiple products files are loaded at once and the same item can be found in several files?

Answer 9

Files are loaded 1 by 1 in alphabetical order. The last occurrence will overwrite previous ones.

Question 10

What happens if there is no name for the product in the product data file?

Answer 10

Item will be loaded and displayed as Unknown Product ‘product ID’ on the second graph of the Past Purchases screen

Question 11

What happens if there is no category in the product data file?

Answer 11

The items will be loaded, but they won’t appear under any of the categories on the past purchases screen.

Question 12

What happens if a product comes with an item (unique ID) already loaded to SI?

Answer 12

The old item is overwritten. This sometimes is done if there is a correction in item name or modified product category.

Question 13

How is Average historical spend calculated in SI?

Answer 13

It is the average historical spend of all the customers in a given lifecycle at any one time.

Question 14

What is Revenue from Current Purchases in SI?

Answer 14

It is all of the revenue made from contacts that converted from this stage to the next. It is relevant to what stage a contact was in at the time they purchased. Not where they moved to after purchasing.

Question 15

How is “Each 1% conversion brought” calculated in SI?

Answer 15

Revenue from current purchases / current conversion rate.

The best revenue potential indicator correlates with the highest number for this metric.

Question 16

How is the predicted revenue calculated in a general sense?

Answer 16

Smart Insight looks at the historical average spending figures for customers in each lifecycle stage and uses these to give an average value to each customer in each stage.

Predicted revenues are then calculated by matching the likelihood of a contact to convert in each stage with the values those conversions would bring. This takes into account not only the initial conversion, but also the average revenue of all subsequent repeat purchases and conversions, giving a predicted lifetime value.

Question 17

How is predicted average future spend calculated (how much they are likely to spend in the future)?

Answer 17

Based on customers
- historical spend
avg value of contact in their lifecycle stage
- conversion rate of that stage
- how much similar contacts have spent when converting in the past

Calculated individually for each contact and then averaged.

Question 18

How is Avg Lifetime spend calculated?

Answer 18

For each contact we add up both their individual historical spend and their predicted future spend. This metric is then calculated as an average for all the contacts that are in each lifecycle stage right now.
Smart Insight also looks into the real revenue figures over the past 30 days to provide figures that can be used to compare the performance of different lifecycle stages.

Question 19

How is Predicted future revenue increase calculated?

Answer 19

This is how much revenue you might expect to earn from contacts who have converted to this lifecycle stage in the past 30 days. It is calculated by summing the difference in the Predicted average future spend for each one of these contacts as they moved from one lifecycle stage to another.

Question 20

What happens if there is no order ID in the sales data file?

Answer 20

Load fails this is a mandatory field

Question 21

What happens if the order date is missing from the sales data file?

Answer 21

The loading fails. This is a mandatory field. The file must be corrected and sent again.

Question 22

What happens if the customer ID in the sales file is missing from the contact database?

Answer 22

We ‘create’ a pseudo contact for this order (basically all such orders are attached to one pseudo contact). This contact would appear as ‘generated’ on the Smart Insight screens and could not be matched with any contact in the Emarsys application.