Validation of Virtual Shopping Data

One measure that has been suggested as a way to validate virtual store results is the correlation of in-store market shares to virtual store market shares.

For a recent study, In Context Solutions obtained in-store sales data for the products in a category for 40 different units of analysis. Some of these were sub-categories, some Brands, and some at a SKU level. When the share of the category dollar sales is calculated for each of the 40 units and correlated with the corresponding share of sales in the virtual store sample the correlation is 0.99.

This is exceptionally high and so we broke it down into the compnent groups thinking perhaps it is related to the sub-category levels being easier to get correct and the SKU level being harder. This is, in fact, true, however, while the correlation for the sub-categories is 0.99, for brands it is still 0.90 and for the SKU level it is 0.91, so they are all very strong correlations.

So, based on this measure, virtual store clearly does a good job of providing sales results that are highly correlated with in-market sales data.

This is not an isolated result. While I was at General Mills we conducted dozens of studies and when we looked at this measure for those studies we consistently saw correlations at 0.9 or higher.