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REV: JULY 25, 2022

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EVA ASCARZA

AYELET ISRAELI

Artea (B): Including Customer-level Demographic

Data

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Upon signup, some users indicated their demographic information such as gender and race, but
most others did not. CEO Alex Campbel was approached by a third-party company, Trackify, that
tracked individuals across the web and offered to match Artea’s dataset with individual level data such
as demographics predicted by their algorithms. Campbel was not sure she needed that data, as she
always believed that all consumers are equal and demographic differences do not matter. Trackify
offered Campbel a sample of their characteristics for the 6,000 customers that visited Artea in the last
month to demonstrate their value. They shared the data with the analytics team for evaluation.
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What do you learn from the data? Would you advise Campbel to buy demographics data? How
should she use it?

The data
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The spreadsheet supplement for this exercise (HBS No. 521-704) contains the dataset
“Next_Campaign_demog,” which includes the information about the 6,000 users who, by the time the
experiment was run and analyzed, visited the website in the previous two months but have not made
a transaction yet. The variables included are described in Table 1. The spreadsheet supplement also
includes the original dataset of the 5,000 users who participated in the A/B test, with their demographic
characteristics, as provided by Trackify (see tab “AB_test_demog”).
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Do

Professors Eva Ascarza and Ayelet Israeli prepared this exercise as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective
handling of an administrative situation. The exercise is not based on a single individual or company but is a composite based on the authors'
general knowledge and experience. Alex Campbel, Trackify, and Artea are fictional.

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 521-022 Artea (B): Including Customer-level Demographic Data

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Table 1

Variable Name Description Notes

Id Unique customer identifier

Minoritya Whether the user was predicted to Information provided by Trackify

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belong to a minority group (=1: Yes; =0: No)
Non-malea Whether the user was predicted to Information provided by Trackify
be non-male (=1: Yes; =0: No)
channel_acq Channel of acquisition for the =1: Google
customer when they first signed =2: Facebook
up to Artea =3: Instagram
=4: Referral
=5: Other

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num_past_purch Number of previous purchases
spent_last_purchase Total spent in previous purchase (USD)
weeks_since_visit # weeks since last visit
browsing_minutes Time spend on website in last visit (minutes)
shopping_cart Whether the user added a product (=1: Yes; =0: No)
to the shopping cart in last visit
(but did not transact)
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a While Trackify offered a more inclusive gender, race, and ethnicity categorization prediction, for simplicity they only provided
coding indicating whether the users in these data were predicted to be from non-majority groups (minority and non-male).
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No
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This document is authorized for educator review use only by Nila Armelia Windasari, Institute Teknologi Bandung (ITB) until Nov 2022. Copying or posting is an infringement of copyright.
Permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu or 617.783.7860