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Upside’s dashboard sets a new standard for performance insights. Here’s why.

The new Upside dashboard not only helps you see the value of the Upside program, but also helps to raise the bar for performance measurement across all your business partnerships.

January 10, 2024

Wayne Lin

Upside’s dashboard sets a new standard for performance insights. Here’s why.

After months of building and testing, we’re thrilled to launch the new and improved Upside Dashboard. Now retailers can do and see even more, using the Dashboard to surface the insights they need to make business decisions about where to invest their hard-won budget.

Most of the retailers we work with are extremely proactive when it comes to using data to make business decisions. Collecting the data they need usually isn’t a challenge; they either handle it internally or enlist a third party to help. Instead, the challenge lies in organizing and structuring that data in a way that provides meaningful and actionable insights into their business.

In the grocery industry—where customer segmentation is already at the heart of retailer decision-making—the difficulty lies in separating out expected behavior to understand the incremental (net-new) impact of any initiative on each customer, and at an aggregate segment-level. That's why we spent the last year working with grocers to understand the best way to surface insights on both customer-level and aggregated segment-level trends that prove Upside’s unique impact.

With the help of tens of thousands of retailers like you, the Dashboard now gives your program owners, finance personnel, marketing managers, and data analysts the specific, concise information they need to make smart investment decisions.
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Features that raise the bar

There’s a lot to be excited about with this newest iteration of our Dashboard. When I think about raising the bar on standard practice for performance measurement, there are three features that illustrate just how impactful these insights are for your business.
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See the impact of each promotion

The standard practice

Advanced retailers often segment their target market into smaller groups, based on information like interests, needs, age, or region. This approach enables more contextually relevant messages and targeted promotions for each group. When evaluating performance, the key focus is on how topline revenue changes based on each group’s response to segment-specific incentives.

The Upside standard

Upside turns customer segmentation on its head, using true one-to-one personalization to influence each customer. Not only can you see the thousands of promotions every customer claims in the new Dashboard, but the Promotions page aggregates the data by customer segment, so you can see the important customer trends and answer the “so what” of Upside for your business in the way that makes the most sense for you.

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Track behavior changes in real time

The standard practice

Retailers running time-bound campaigns often use pre-post measurement to see the impact of their investment on customer behavior. Performance reports show the “before” and the “after,” attributing everything that occurred in the interim to the campaign. While imperfect, metrics like clicks, views, and scanned coupons provide directional trends that help retailers make decisions about future.

The Upside standard

With Upside, you can see exactly how your customers’ behavior is changing—whether they’re transacting on or off the Upside app—in terms of both transactions and sales. These always-on promotions create lasting changes in behavior over time, influencing even your most loyal customers.

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For fuel retailers, identify underutilized resources

The standard practice

Given the high cost of land and equipment, fuel retailers work to ensure that every pump is in use as much as possible. Many station owners manually count the number of cars that come through a station in any given hour or hire an outside consultant to do so. These methods are expensive, laborious, and only show a momentary snapshot of what your utilization looks like on-site.

The Upside standard

Fuel retailers on Upside can measure their pump utilization rate across their sites with the click of a button, to discover how often their pumps are empty during operating hours or by specific times of day (like peak hours). This helps to identify how many more gallons they could reasonably stand to gain by attracting more customer fill-ups, informing business decisions about where to invest.

This is only available for fuel today, but more is coming soon.

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‍Standard practice versus Upside’s practice: How we make it possible ‍

Upside’s test versus control methodology—in which we compare each individual Upside user with up to 100 “similar” users to isolate our “incremental” impact—is standard practice for medical studies, scientific experiments, and online commerce. But this approach is not the standard in brick and mortar commerce.

Instead, the standard in brick and mortar retail is pre-post measurement of a time-bound campaign. Looking at the duration of the campaign, metrics like clicks, views and scanned coupons provide retailers with important directional trends. But attributing all the business activity during that time to the campaign is risky for retailers.

This is where Upside goes beyond industry standard.

We run rigorous “test versus control” measurement for each individual user, at scale, encompassing millions of customers and hundreds of thousands of retail locations. This enables us to understand and change consumer behavior in a way that drives bottom-line profit.

Specifically, Upside analyzes your business, learns about the users near you (while safeguarding their privacy!), and delivers each user the personalized incentive they need to encourage them to choose your business more often. Importantly, this is done without double discounting, without taking credit for your other initiatives, and without cannibalizing your expected profit. In fact, you don’t pay for any customer incentive that doesn’t deliver incremental profit.

And now you can see all those data points right in your dashboard.
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Why the new standard matters

We’ve seen too many retailers either leave money on the table by under-investing in growth strategies that work, or lose money by investing in growth strategies that don’t. But distinguishing between the two is a challenge without information that confirms you’re investing in lasting customer behavior change that drives bottom-line profit, not just momentary campaign-driven sales blips.

Online commerce has already figured this out: real-time, user-level personalization and measurement maximizes value for everyone involved. We’re working to make sure brick and mortar commerce gets there too.

Products like the new Upside dashboard not only help you see the value of the Upside program, but also to help raise the bar for performance measurement across all your business partnerships.

Wayne Lin

As co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Upside, Wayne Lin is working to personalize brick-and-mortar commerce to help communities thrive. His extensive experience in product management, marketing, and operations has helped Upside drive $5 billion in commerce to date. Parallel to his professional interests, Wayne has founded a not-for-profit company and patented five different technologies to help people save energy and lower costs.