Merkle Adds Google Curbside, Retail Store Data To Its COVID-19 Economic Tracker

Merkle has begun integrating Google data into its Economic Resilience Dashboard that measures the effects of COVID-19 on curbside pickups and demand for brick-and-mortar sales per county.

The agency is looking for different strategies per messages based on where there are low infection rates and a high degree of disposable income, and people showing search interest around retail.

The data became available about two weeks ago, but the agency has just begun to integrate it into their dashboard.

"It’s similar to the 'near me' searches," said Matthew Mierzejewski, SVP and search capability lead at agency Merkle.

Merkle’s Economic Resilience dashboard combines data from the agency’s DataSource datasets with publicly available COVID-19 data via the New York Times, and data from Google to help marketers in the United States make better decisions when they create and run marketing and advertising campaigns.

Earlier this week, Shirli Zelcer, COO of analytics at Merkle, said the initial dashboards were built to analyze economic data rather than look at income, which is pretty unstable, she said.

“We looked at disposable income historically, as well as the average liquid assets, which helped us to understand the financial security of consumers,” she said.

The goal is to help marketers focus on planning their way back from the downward trend around the pandemic before they plan to open stores.

The new integration for the dashboard provides details on the economy in a given area, and will also help brands create their messages in campaigns. For example, there needed to be a difference between hard-hit areas with stable and unstable economics.  

Next story loading loading..