Retailers chasing lofty growth goals are serious about measuring their results. Tracking the impact of every investment helps those retailers to direct their resources accordingly.  

At Upside, we serve those retailers by providing them with the opportunity to earn fully attributable, fully “incremental” profit. “Incremental” refers to the revenue and transactions that would not have happened without Upside. When these retailers ask to test the effectiveness of our measurement methodology with a third party, we’re happy to show our work. 

MitraQSR is a restaurant franchisee based in Texas. With more than 175 KFC and Taco Bell locations in its portfolio, Mitra is one of the 50 largest restaurant franchisees in America. The franchisee’s leaders recently engaged a Big Four accounting firm to validate Upside’s segmentation reporting — in particular, how we identify and group new versus returning customers. 

“At Mitra, we don’t just believe in growth — we believe in measurable, data-backed growth,” said Mitra CEO Pushpak Patel. “Working with Upside and validating results is part of how we keep things accountable.”

After a comprehensive review, Mitra and its accounting partner validated that Upside accurately characterizes new and returning customers as such — a critical step to determine our incremental impact. This assessment solidifies Upside’s standing as an industry leader in measurement. 

This assessment proves Upside’s ability to change consumer behavior. If we're accurately characterizing new and returning customers, then our claims that Upside influenced certain customers to try your business are accurate.

"Upside's measurement really is unique, and having confidence in that measurement is critical to our partnership,” Patel said. “They've always been a trusted partner, and this validation really reinforces that for our team. We’re excited to keep working together to attract new and lapsed customers to our restaurants.”

The third-party experiment: Approach and results

Mitra (along with any of Upside’s retail partners) can access key data insights and detailed transaction records in their Upside dashboard. For this validation, Mitra wanted to determine whether the customers that Upside said were new and incremental were actually new and incremental. 

To do that, Mitra compared its data from Fiserv, the franchisee’s credit card processor, to the data in Upside’s system. The goal was to identify if any existing customers appeared erroneously as “new” customers in Upside’s data. 

After Mitra and its accounting partner ran the numbers, the third-party validation determined that 90% of customers that Upside classifies as “new” and “incremental” were, in fact, new and incremental. 

Why not 100%? Mitra and its accounting partner found more “new” customers in the data than Upside did. The difference in new customer totals comes down to the slight differences in the time period before a customer's first Upside transaction, which is what is used to determine whether the customer is “new.”

How Upside measures impact

Upside’s best-in-class measurement methodology demonstrates the attributable, incremental profit that the platform drives to retailers. Through “test versus control” analyses, Upside shows how much profit retailers make with Upside compared to how much they would likely make without Upside. The difference is the added value Upside brings to partners — our “incremental” impact. 

This methodology, which relies on anonymous transaction data that retailers already have on-hand, can be broken down into four steps: 

1. Identify the user: When a customer claims an Upside offer, we use retailer transaction data, not including any personally identifiable information, to build a user profile based on their previous shopping behavior. We have full wallet visibility, so one customer using multiple cards would not be categorized as multiple users. (Our user identification process is what Mitra and its accounting partner validated.)

2. Pair the user with a control group: We find between five and 10 non-Upside users with similar purchasing histories over the past year. This is important because both the Upside user and their control group are exposed to the same things on-site: marketing, traffic, holidays, store remodels, etc. 

3. Establish a baseline for that user’s behavior: This control group’s average spend represents what we’d expect the Upside user to spend without Upside. 

4. Measure what’s really incremental: On an ongoing basis, Upside compares spend between the Upside user and control group. The difference in the user’s actual spend and the control group’s average is what we deem directly attributable to Upside.

This meticulous measurement process is important because it pinpoints exactly the results that can be attributed to Upside. Perhaps more critically for retailers, it draws clear distinctions on what can be attributed to external factors like their existing initiatives. Platforms with less-comprehensive methodologies or revenue-sharing agreements will take credit for factors outside of their control, like a retailer’s organic sales or seasonal shopping trends.

On top of our accurate attribution, Upside’s profit-sharing agreement (in contrast to revenue-sharing) guarantees a positive return for the retailer. When Upside drives incremental, net-new profit that the retailer would not have earned without our influence, we share in that together. But Upside only makes money if the retailer does — we’ll fund any promotions that don’t deliver net-new foot traffic or larger orders from existing customers.

Incremental profit, validated by the experts

Get in touch with our team of retail experts to learn more about how Upside can impact your business.