MMM Pilot™

Preparing Your CSV: Formatting Best Practices for MMM Pilot™

Before you upload, your data needs to be clean. Computers are literal; they don’t guess what you mean—they only read what you write. To avoid “Invalid Data” errors, follow these simple formatting rules for your CSV file.

Screenshot of a sample input file

Download a sample file: CSV Format, MS Excel Format

1. The File Format

MMM Pilot™ exclusively supports .csv (Comma Separated Values) files.

  • Single Sheet: Ensure your data is on a single sheet, not spread across multiple tabs like in an Excel workbook.
  • Clean Headers: Your first row should contain clear, simple column names (e.g., facebook_spend, revenue, date). Avoid using special characters ($%#) or emojis in your headers.

2. The Golden Rule of Dates

The most common error users face involves date formatting. To ensure the system correctly maps your timeline, you must use the ISO 8601 standard format.

  • Format: YYYY-MM-DD (e.g., 2023-12-31).
  • Why: Different countries write dates differently (DD/MM vs. MM/DD). Using YYYY-MM-DD eliminates ambiguity so the model knows exactly when events happened.

3. Handling “No Data” (Zeros vs. Blanks)

In data science, a blank cell (null) is a mystery, but a zero is a fact.

  • Use Zeros: If you didn’t spend money on Facebook in a specific week, enter 0. Do not leave the cell empty. A zero tells the model, “We did nothing here,” which is valuable information.
  • Avoid Blanks: Empty cells can cause the upload to fail because the system doesn’t know if the data is missing or just zero.

4. Currency and Consistency

When you create a project in MMM Pilot, you define a specific country and currency.

  • One Currency: Ensure all spend and revenue columns in your CSV use the same currency. Do not mix USD and EUR in the same column.
  • No Symbols: Remove currency symbols ($, €) and commas from the cells. The value should be a clean number (e.g., 1500.50, not $1,500.50).

5. Granularity Check

Ensure your data rows represent consistent time intervals.

  • Do not mix daily rows with weekly rows in the same file.
  • We recommend weekly data for the best balance between detail and processing speed for initial pilot models.