Competitive performance

Competitive performance dashboard compares your Panel Sales metric performance against the market and competitors. Additionally, it helps you identify the biggest and most unique drivers that are driving over or under-performance compared to the market.

Use this dashboard to:

  • Understand how your performance compares to your competitors or the market.

  • Understand why you or a competitor are over or under-performing the market by uncovering the most distinct drivers of performance.

  • Analyze the performance against competitors and the market for a specific region or DMA.

Watch this video to learn about Competitive performance:

How did your brand perform vs. the market and competitors?

Use this section to understand how your brand is doing compared to your competitors. On the left, select a brand either by searching on the search bar or scrolling down the list of options. To use brands from the Competitive set defined in your instance, toggle Show competitive set and select one or more brands. Mouse over the lines on the line chart to highlight how your brand, competitor(s), and the market performed throughout the Comparison period. This example shows how McDonald's is performing compared to Chick-fill-A and the rest of the market, in the East North central region during January 2022 compared to 2019:

The line chart shows McDonald's, Chick-fill-A, and market lines to compare panel sales performance in East North Central region in January 2022 versus 2019.

To visualize a part of a chart in more detail, click and drag the area to see. Click Reset zoom to see the bar chart in its original size.

This section explains the reason behind your brand performance compared to the market and your competitors. Click each trend to see its details and mouse over the options under the line chart to highlight how your brand and the market performed during the selected comparison period. This image shows the trends that account for McDonald's National region performance during Q3 2023, compared to 2019:

McDonald's unique trends are: Average Check size, Dinner, Frequency, New/returned customers.

Click Compare brands to see the trends from your brand together with a selected competitor in a side-by-side visualization. Click each trend to see its details and mouse over the options under the line chart to highlight how your brand and the market performed during the selected time.

McDonald's trends listed and compared to different brands.

If you also have the KPI tracking dashboard in your instance, click the suggested action in the Frequency driver to navigate to that dashboard.

To visualize a part of a chart in more detail, click and drag the area to see. Click Reset zoom to see the bar chart in its original size.

Data and methodology

Competitive performance uses the Transaction dataset, specifically the Panel sales metric. For more information, see Datasets.

Drivers of performance

Drivers of performance are metrics that assess all available trends. These include:

  1. 1st-party panel sales KPIs:

    1. Check size — Average amount of dollars spent per transaction out of all the brand transactions.

    2. Frequency — Average number of transactions per panelists on a a particular brand or market. At least one transaction is required to be part of this metric.

    3. Penetration — Percent of total panelists that made one or more transactions with a particular brand or market during a period of time.

  2. Channel KPIs:
    Note: These drivers might not be available for all brands or retailers.

    1. Physical panel sales — Sales for a brand or retailer originated in-store.

    2. Digital panel sales — Sales for a brand or retailer originated digitally.

    3. 3rd-party delivery panel sales — Sales for a brand or retailer that originated from 3rd-party delivery platforms such as DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, etc.

  3. Panel sales by ethnicity — Sales for a brand or retailer coming from a specific ethnic group.
    1. African American
    2. Asian
    3. Caucasian
    4. Hispanic
    5. Other
  4. Panel sales by income — Sales for a brand or retailer coming from a specific Income group.

    1. Less than USD 40,000

    2. USD 40,000 - 60,000

    3. USD 60,000 - 80,000.

    4. More than USD 80,000.

  5. Panel sales by geography (not applicable to KPI tracking) — Sales for a brand or retailer coming from a specific geography.
    1. Regions
    2. Designated market areas.
  6. Panel sales by customer segment — Sales for a brand or retailer coming from a specific Customer segment.

    1. High frequency — Panelists who have the threshold number of transactions or more over the previous 6 months.

    2. Low frequency — Panelists who have less than the threshold level of transactions over the previous 6 months.

    3. New/Returned customers — Panelists who have a transaction with the brand in the selected period but hadn't had a transaction with the brand for at least 6 months.

      MarketFrequency threshold (in Competitive performance and Customer profile)Frequency threshold (in Customer migration)
      3rd-party grocery delivery 6-
      3rd-party restaurant delivery 6-
      Airline6-
      Amusement park 6-
      Apparel31
      Audio streaming 6-
      Auto parts31
      Beauty specialty 31
      Books61
      Buy now, pay later 6-
      C-store9-
      Cable, satellite, and ISP 6-
      Car rentals6-
      Casual dining31
      Catering6-
      Club122
      Consumer electronics62
      Craft32
      Department31
      Dollar62
      Domestic merchandise 3-
      Drug62
      E-commerce 216
      Family dining 31
      Fast casual 62
      Frozen desserts62
      Furniture 31
      Health and fitness 62
      Home improvement 62
      Hotels6-
      Industrial and construction 6-
      Liquor31
      Mass 122
      Meal kits 6-
      Office supplies31
      Online grocery 6-
      Other (Retail) 6-
      Pet specialty 32
      Pizza 62
      Quick service 62
      Ridesharing 6-
      Sporting goods 31
      Supermarket 122
      TeleComm 62
      Ticketing 6-
      Travel aggregator6-
      Video streaming6-

Each driver of performance directly contributes to increasing, decreasing, or having no impact on Panel sales. For example, if Check size increases, it has a positive effect on how much money each transaction brings, which means that an increase in Check size by itself has a positive impact on Panel sales (as long as the other KPIs remain the same). Sense360 builds data models to determine how much each of the drivers of performance contributes to Panel Sales performance in each period. The outputs of these models are contributions, since each driver contributes to determining the top-level Panel Sales performance.

The drivers of performance displayed are the ones with the biggest overall contribution on Panel Sales for that period. So for example, if Panel Sales for Asian ethnicity customers increased from $10M to $12M, while Panel Sales for Hispanic ethnicity customers increased from $5M to 6M, then the Asian ethnicity has a bigger contribution ($2M versus $1M). A similar process calculates the contributions across all drivers of performance and ranks them to select only those with the biggest impact on Panel Sales.

Note: There are some drivers with negative impact even if Panel Sales is up, and vice-versa: even if Panel sales is overall up, there might still be sub-trends for specific KPIs, customer demographics, etc. that have a negative impact on Panel Sales.

The drivers of performance displayed when selecting Unique have the most unique trends for the brand compared to the market for that period. These are the trends that are most dissimilar between the brand and the market. For example, if the Brand is seeing Panel Sales up at breakfast by 10%, while the market's average is -5%, this would be considered a "unique" trend.

Note: There are some drivers with a negative impact even if its performance is positive, and vice-versa: even if the driver is overall up, the market might still be significantly more up, which makes the driver's performance lagged behind the market.

Filters

Dashboards come with filters at the top of the screen to filter and organize the data shown in them. Select the field values to filter dashboard data, and then click Apply filters to see that selection reflected in the different modules. As you make selections, some of the remaining fields adjust dynamically so that only applicable options are available. To filter this dashboard, click Show filters at the top and select:

Brand

Lists of available brands for analysis. Brands displayed depend on what market you are is set up with.

Comparison period

Use this filter to show data in the specific time periods, such as Year over Year (YoY), Period over Period (PoP), or versus 2019.

Geography

List of United States geographies to analyze, which includes National (all of the U.S.), My System (the combination of all Designated market areas where there is at least a store), Regions, and every individual Designated market area.

Aggregation

A group of different time periods (such as Week, Month, or Quarter) to display data within the selected ranges.

Year
Calendar year to see insights from.

To export the dashboard information as a Excel file, click Export.

What's next?

Together with Competitive performance, use these dashboards to obtain supplementary insights:

  • KPI tracking — Digs deeper into insights uncovered for specific KPIs, competitors, or geographies.

  • Market performance — Add context in your analysis for how the overall market is performing and what are the biggest drivers of performance.

  • Customer profile — Understands your customers' key demographic profiles and how they differ from your competitors.