Regarding non-media and organic variables

[diego-mutt]

Hello,

In relation to non-media and organic variables, I could not find the specific format we should specify it for the model on the codebase; on the data builder it only specifies a dataframe but no more info is added. Let's pick the example csv from the Meridian documentation where we have Promo and also Competitor Sales Control. What does those values mean in Promo column? Are they percentages, absolute values or anything else? I guess competitor sales relates to daily competitor sales value, so as long as we have that time series it should be fine. But what about promotions or discounts?

There are some intuitive time-series that are easy to add (emails, sms, etc.) but some of them are not so-intuitive. What's the best way to include organic and non-media variables into Meridian? I'm sorry if I skip something on the documentation or the codebase, but could not find an indicator on this topic.

Thank you in advance.

[dattatreyam23]

Hi @diego-mutt,

Thank you for contacting us.

To answer your question on how you should include non-media and organic media variables, I believe any format that makes business sense would be sufficient. You need not worry about an exact recommended format because Meridian does internal scaling before modeling these variables and then inverse transforms them to original scales while presenting results.

Also, in addition to standard internal scaling, Meridian provides a specific option to scale non-media treatments and control variables by population size. This feature is disabled by default, but it can be selectively enabled for specific inputs where it is logical—for example, population-scaling competitor sales might make sense, whereas scaling temperature would not. This customization is handled using the non_media_population_scaling_id and control_population_scaling_id arguments, respectively for non-media treatments and control variables, allowing you to apply population scaling only to the appropriate variables.

Hope this suffices. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions or suggestions regarding the same.

Thank you,

Google Meridian Support Team