The Upside effect

Upside drives incremental transactions and profit to your business by changing customer behavior. What sets the program apart is our ability to clearly measure that lift - and ensure you only pay for proven new, profitable transactions. Measuring our incremental impact requires us to develop a complete picture of each user’s spending behavior at your sites. In this article, we’re going to explain more about how we do that - specifically, the concept of attributable sales. 

“Total user sales” and attributable sales are two key metrics Upside uses to measure changes in customer behavior and our impact on driving these changes. Read on to learn more about how Upside defines and calculates these metrics:

What does Upside mean by “total sales” ? 

When Upside users transact at your business, sometimes they claim an Upside promotion, and sometimes they don’t. We calculate total user sales in order to measure each user’s complete spending at your business - whether or not an Upside promotion was claimed. 

Important note: you will only ever pay for customer promotions and profit-sharing fees on transactions where an Upside offer was claimed

When measuring incrementality, we start by comparing total sales for each Upside user to the total sales for the user’s control group. This side-by-side comparison allows us to develop a complete picture of each group’s spending at your business

Quantifying each Upside user’s total spending relative to their control group is the first step in measuring Upside’s impact. Next, we need to determine the proportion of total user sales that are directly attributable to Upside. 

What are attributable sales? 

Attributable Upside sales are the portion of total user sales that are made with a claimed Upside promotion. We call these “attributable sales” because, well, they’re directly attributable to Upside. Since the Upside user claimed an offer through the app (or one of our partner apps), we know that this transaction is directly attributable to the program. 

Why is it important to measure & track attributable sales? Because the only transactions where you pay for promotions and Upside profit-sharing fees are attributable Upside sales - if, and only if, those sales are also incremental (i.e., wouldn’t have otherwise happened without Upside). Learn more about incrementality here. 

In summary:

• Both total and attributable sales are used to measure changes in customer behavior
• Upside only takes credit for sales that flow through our app and network of partner apps which can be directly attributed to our program
• You only ever pay for sales that are attributable, incremental, and profitable to your business