Matchbacks: Tools and Technologies to Try

•No-cost, faux matchback test. If your budget is extremely tight, a good way to keep matchback costs low is to go through the exercise of allocating unknowns based on several methods such as percent of total sales across the season, percent of total monthly sales per group or percent of marketing budget spent. Compare the results of these allocation methods with your matchback results. If the results for faux and actual matchbacks are close, you may be able to do fewer matchbacks in a given time period by using whatever allocation method seemed to give similar results. Don’t skip doing actual matchbacks too frequently, however, as buying behaviors tend to change rapidly.