As analysts, we love to optimize everything that we possibly can — so when we have a speaker that gives us a new way to think about testing we are here for it!

For our October event we had Sanjay Tamrakar talk to us about doing geo-testing. Sanjay covered basic methods like traditional pilot testing, to difference in differences, all the way to the current state-of-the-art with Geolift.

Back in the pre-digital era, Columbus was considered to be a top location in the US to pilot test new products, since its demographics closely matched the country as a whole. This allowed companies to try out new products, but only gave marketers an idea of how well a new product might do nationwide, not how much incremental lift different product variations might give or how different Columbus might perform vs. Chicago or Charleston. This kind of granularity requires more powerful tools.

These days there are much more expedient and statistically rigorous methods to test things, like Geolift. Geolift is a an open-source package from Meta that allows the creation of artificial control groups which we can use to test against treatment groups without having to worry as much about building control groups using user-specific information and the privacy issues which that can bring. Geolift’s synthetic control methods can create control groups by amalgamating different untreated areas whose performance was expected to match the treated areas.

There was even some R code showing up on the big screen, which sadly Tim Wilson missed!

Sanjay was also kind enough to provide us with his slides: