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Market Matching: Overview

What is Market Matching?​

Market Matching is a method used to find the most comparable control markets for a chosen test market.

It answers: "Which untreated markets behave most similarly to my test market before intervention?"

This is a critical setup step for causal measurement workflows such as GeoLift.

Why Market Matching matters​

Good matching improves decision confidence by reducing bias in test-vs-control comparisons.

Without strong matches:

  • impact can be overstated or understated,
  • significance can become unstable,
  • and follow-up decisions become riskier.

Core capabilities​

1) Intelligent matching​

  • Automatically analyzes pre-period market behavior
  • Ranks potential controls by similarity
  • Supports multiple matching methods (balanced, causal, quick)

2) Quality and balance checks​

  • Computes similarity scores per control market
  • Evaluates balance statistics (including SMD-style diagnostics)
  • Produces quality scores and balance pass/fail indicators

3) Guided, review-ready outputs​

  • Primary matching table (test market -> ranked controls)
  • Quality assessment summary
  • Similarity chart and treatment-level drilldown
  • PDF report artifact

What data it uses​

Market Matching works on time-series data with:

  • a date column,
  • a market/location column,
  • and an outcome metric column.

The pipeline auto-detects these fields and can also take user overrides.

Typical use cases​

  • Choose controls for causal testing
  • Validate whether existing test/control pairs are reliable
  • Compare markets for rollout planning
  • Identify where intervention learning can be transferred safely

Typical decisions it supports​

  • "Are these controls good enough to trust causal results?"
  • "Should we change test markets before running GeoLift?"
  • "Which markets are comparable for pilot expansion?"
  • "Do we need to rerun with stricter quality thresholds?"

Where it fits in the product experience​

Market Matching is a structured workflow:

  • submit job,
  • run in background,
  • review ranked controls and quality diagnostics,
  • export report artifacts.

Quick value summary​

Market Matching provides:

  • stronger control selection,
  • transparent quality diagnostics,
  • and more reliable foundations for downstream causal decisions.
  • Methodology — how the pipeline works technically (market-matching-methodology)
  • Models — balanced, causal, quick matching explained (market-matching-models)
  • Workflow — step-by-step process (market-matching-workflow)
  • Results — how to read and interpret outputs (market-matching-results)