Glossary

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Welcome to the intelligentVIEW Glossary. Your quick-reference guide to the terms, concepts, and metrics used throughout the platform.

Whether you’re just getting started or need a refresher, this glossary is designed to help you confidently interpret the data, understand the language of audience insights, and get the most value from your intelligentVIEW experience. From technical definitions to platform-specific terminology, you’ll find clear explanations to support your day-to-day work.

Use this resource anytime you encounter unfamiliar terms while exploring reports, building audiences, or activating campaigns..

Audience Builder or “AB”

Audience Builder(i.e. with Numeris RTS)allows you to select from an extensive list of demographic and psychographic attributes to create a custom target.

A great tool if you do not have access to customer data, want to profile competitors’ customers, or can describe what your desired target audience looks like.

Audience File

intelligentVIEW files are collections of postal codes of customers or markets used as input for profiling and targeting.

Benchmark or “Bmk”

A benchmark is the point of reference to compare the data from your file. This allows us to see the differences and similarities between your file and a benchmark.

For example, if your benchmark is Ontario, the characteristics of your target file are compared again to the demographics from Ontario. intelligentVIEW provides two benchmark options, Custom and Geographic. Any file or geography can be selected as a benchmark.

Benchmark – Custom

A custom benchmark is a file that you create. It can be used to compare two customer files, trade areas, or types of customers.

Benchmark – Geographic

A standard geographic benchmark is a specific area derived from Census geographies. (i.e. Toronto, Alberta or all of Canada).

Standard geographic benchmarks are pre-set in intelligentVIEW. Just choose from the list provided.

You can create your own geographic benchmarks by creating files from the map radius tool, or selecting from the FSA map.

Canada Post Carrier Walks

Carrier Walks, Letter Carrier Walks, Letter Carrier Routes or LCRs as they are sometimes known represent the postal codes walked by a Canada Post letter carrier.

They are the smallest unit of geography used for the delivery of Neighborhood Mail (formally unaddressed ad mail).

Carrier Walk information is updated monthly and is used for creating targeted direct mail campaigns.

Canada Post “EST” Format

Electronic Shipping Tool format used as input by your agency or direct mail partner to upload your target into the Canada Post tools for delivery.

CMA

Census Metropolitan Areas are city or market definitions by Statistics Canada.

intelligentVIEW has a default Project named Standard geographies, where CMAs are stored. Use CMAs for your analysis as the Target File or Benchmark.

CSV File

CSV (Comma Separated Values) is the file format accepted by intelligentVIEW.

Any postal code file uploaded to intelligentVIEW must first be saved as a .CSV.

Custom Audience Builder

If enabled, an audience builder based on your own first-party data, allows you to build audiences from customer information and other data sources that may be proprietary to your organization.

Customer File

Processing the File keeps duplicates in order to Provide the Appropriate weighting. In this file, each row represents a single Customer.

Dealertrack Audience Builder

Updated monthly, Automotive Audience Builder allows you to build custom audiences based on over 27 million automotive sales transactions including, make, model, year, transaction date, finance term, etc.

Demographics

Statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it.

File %

The percentage of your total customers that fall into a specific segment or exhibit the characteristic in the report (ie 56% of my 10,000 customers are university educated).

FSALDU

Forward Sortation Area (the first3 digits of a postal code);

LocalDelivery Unit (the last 3 digits of a postal code).

There are approximately 1,800 FSAs and 800,000 unique FSALDUs in Canada.

They are used as a common identifier and connector within intelligentVIEW.

Heat Map

Heat Maps allow you to visualize the concentration of your customers and potential market opportunity in your Audience File on Google Maps™.

HH (File)

Number of households/customers that exist within your target file.

Index

An index is a measure that quantifies the degree of difference of a target’s attributes compared to a benchmark. If the percentage of the target attribute is exactly the same as the benchmark, it is represented by 100 – all things are equal.

Insights Report

An Insights Report is a detailed analysis of the set of postal codes contained in your Audience File in the form of hundreds of attributes spread out across several reports modules.

They contain valuable information on which marketing decisions are to be made, and are also used as a targeting tool to identify who you should be targeting with your campaigns, how you should reach them, as well as what kind of creative and media would work best on them.

intelligentVIEW AdSpot

Competitive ad tracking integrated within intelligentVIEW.

AdSpot reporting helps you understand competitor creative as well as activity info such as ad size, media channel, ad position, frequency, occurrence, insertions, and % share of activity.

IntelligentSEGMENTS

A two-tiered segmentation system developed by CiG.

The first tier consists of 20 groups. Each group contains households that share similar key characteristics including, geography, demographics, psychographics, spending, product and media usage, and shopping behavior.

The second tier of clusters is made of 94 segments to further detail the unique characteristics of Canadians even further.

Map Radius File

A file of postal codes that fall within a circle around a single postal code.

A Radius File is helpful for when you know where your customers are but do not have access to a postal code file. For example, the territory serviced by a store location.

Market File

Processing the File removes duplicate rows since selecting ‘Market File’

allows you to upload entire trade areas of Postal codes/FSAs which include every person living in these postal codes/FSAs for analysis.

Merge File

Combining different Files to create a single view of your customers or store locations.

Over-index

An index is a measure that quantifies the degree of difference of a target’s attributes compared to a Benchmark.

Any number above 100 represents how much the target attribute is above average.

We say something is over-indexed.

Postal Code

Postal codes are the smallest entity for which data is available. When you create a radius or attribute selection, you are actually pulling postal codes to analyze.

There are approximately 900,000 postal codes in Canada and CiG has 1000s of pieces of data for each.

Segmentation

Segmentation is the process of dividing large homogenous groups into smaller unique groups (segments) based on characteristics.

Marketers use segmentation to inform marketing and advertising planning, identify the best customers, create relevant content, and develop highly targeted campaigns and programs.

Segments

People with similar perspectives, consumer habits, lifestyle, income, and life stages tend to cluster together and can be grouped into segments to help marketers understand them.

Under-index

An index is a measure that quantifies the degree of difference of a target’s attributes compared to a Benchmark.

Any number below 100 represents how much the target attribute is below the benchmark.

We say something is under-indexed.