Affinity is the leading provider of purchase data intelligence that powers insights, activation, measurement and personalization applications for marketers, enabling them to make better decisions and form deeper relationships with customers. Affinity’s rich dataset covers transactions which are granular all the way down to individual store locations.
Affinity customers include purchases of data about retail brands. In more than one occasion, Affinity found themselves facing customers looking for insights that required combining their datasets with other datasets. For example, a retail brand might be interested in figuring out which of their stores outperform on a revenue-per-visit (RPV) basis, relative to other retailers.
Analyses like these can be complex, because they require multiple disparate datasets to be brought together in order to tell a story. Fortunately, because Placekey was designed to solve this specific matching problem by ingesting information about a place - a place name and address - and generating a unique, authoritative identifier which could then be used to perform address matching, Affinity decided to append Placekeys to their data to make it easier to solve these problems.
Using Placekey, Affinity was able to give its customers the ability to drive insights like these. For this particular question - about comparing revenue per-visit to other retailers, Affinity was able to use Placekeys to compare its data against SafeGraph, a location data provider that aggregates anonymized location data from numerous applications in order to provide broad insights about physical places, such as number of visits, bucketed dwell times, and much more.
Affinity was able to take a sample of the data containing information about US-based Target stores:
... and merge it with a sample of SafeGraph’s data for one US-based Target location:
How were they able to do it?
The Solution: Enter Placekey
Placekey, designed as a universal identifier for any physical place, was created to make it easy to merge disparate address and POI datasets together. Behind the scenes, Placekey does the difficult job of POI resolution, address standardization, validation, and geolocation to produce a simple identifier that uniquely identifies a place. Here, the two different street names resolve to the same Placekey, which could then be used to merge the two data sets the Affinity customer had access to together.
Using the Placekey to join produced the below dataset:
From these columns, it was possible to directly compute a measure of dollars spent per visit - an analysis tool which relies on data from both Affinity and SafeGraph, and which gives a more holistic view of revenue-per-visitor (RPV) at a very granular level. The store age column was then leveraged to produce the below plot of store age versus conversion.
All-in-all, this user story demonstrated how Affinity’s best-in-class transaction dataset was able to be joined to third-party data sources like SafeGraph's by leveraging Placekey to match POIs and addresses. With Placekey, Affinity customers are now able to drive connected consumer insights that were previously unavailable. In this short video, Affinity Solution’s Chief Product Officer, Nitin Duggal, discusses what the future of Placekey will mean for Affinity customers.
