What's new in Alli: Commerce Insights, competitor promotions, and more
From Nathan Barling Product Marketing Principal
Hi,
October was a big one. Commerce Insights is out as a new product, right in time for holiday planning. Business Insights can now track competitor promotions, you can ask Alli about the data behind any Generative Dashboard without leaving it, and StackAdapt just joined Audience Planner.
Commerce Insights is here
Commerce Insights brings commerce data into Alli, with an agent that helps you define a market and find the brands and products in it. You describe the market you care about, and purchases, product views, and search clicks across retailers show up in one view, with Ask Alli on the side for follow-up questions.
It's in Alli for everyone, under Strategy and Planning.
I first used it after Prime Day to see the trends across Amazon. I could also see what happened on the other marketplaces at the same time, which showed an increase on most secondary marketplaces too, even without a big event of their own. Now I use it for competitor research whenever we build a retail plan. Keyword trends and how brands are discounting are what we're using to plan for Black Friday right now. Discounting is shifting, too: in our Prime Big Deal Days retrospective, built on Commerce Insights and our PMG Velocity platform, 45.6% of Amazon products were discounted, down from 53.8% a year earlier, and products with a deal badge grew revenue 97% week over week.
Every brand is in Commerce Insights, so you can also see how you did against your peer set.
Track competitor promotions in Business Insights
Business Insights has a new Competitor Activity view. It shows promotion trends, a timeline of active promotions, email volume, and a searchable grid with the original emails, all filterable by competitor. You also choose which brands you follow from the same place.
It's built into Alli and available for every customer.
Business Insights is one of the products I use most. You can set up more than one research workflow, so I have one that tracks competitors and another that follows the platforms in our space for new tech and trends. Those two feed our positioning, our content plans, and what we add to alli.pmg.com.
Ask Alli about any dashboard
You can now ask questions about the data behind a Generative Dashboard from inside the dashboard.
Trust matters more than anything with a dashboard. When a chart shows an index or a rolled-up number, people want to know where it came from before they act on it. Now they can just ask.
One thing you might notice: on long date ranges, the dashboard now switches to a coarser date grain on its own (weeks instead of days, for example). That's what keeps big dashboards from timing out.
I also use Ask Alli to edit dashboards. Even something this simple works:
Can you make this line chart into a pie chart and make the pie chart different shades of blue?
StackAdapt joins Audience Planner
StackAdapt is now a programmatic partner in Audience Planner's Where to Reach Me section. Match a persona to StackAdapt's off-the-shelf and third-party segments and you see the audience size next to every other place you could reach them.
If you haven't looked at Where to Reach Me in a while, here's everyone else who joined in 2026:
- Pinterest, with the Pinterest interests that fit your persona.
- Reddit, with reach curves that show how coverage grows as impressions go up.
- LinkedIn, with category suggestions based on your persona.
- Netflix, with reach split by age and gender. Netflix only shares reach curves, though, so you won't see interest-level detail like you do on the others.
- Media partner audiences, sized for your persona, with no extra authorization.
- Podcasts, down to the specific shows your persona listens to.
- Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as their own sections instead of one combined Meta view.
The ones I'm most excited about are podcasts and creators. They're two of the fastest-growing channels, and teams have been using them to find shows and creators their audience already follows before they plan a sponsorship.
It's more flexible than the name suggests, too. I recently helped our HR and People team build personas for roles we were hiring for. They researched where to reach those candidates and what they value in an employer, then had Ask Alli help write the LinkedIn post.
Also new
- Saved Scenarios in Scenario Planner. Save your edits to a scenario, come back later to compare, and review forecast against actuals at the end of a period.
- Cmd+K gets you anywhere in Alli. Press it and type where you want to go.
Heads up
We turned off the v1 Alli Data API endpoints on November 5. If a script or skill still calls v1, move it to v3 (v2 still works, but v3 is the one we recommend).
Everything else that shipped in October is in the changelog.
New on the blog
We've been writing more about how AI and measurement actually behave in marketing. A few from this month:
- Why your MMM's range matters more than its number: a channel's ROAS is a range, and that range should drive the budget call.
- Drift is the bug nobody files: models lose accuracy quietly, and five questions catch it.
- Most agent failures are evaluation failures: what to test before an agent goes live.
- Why finance doesn't trust marketing's numbers: it's usually the definition, not the result.
Get more out of Alli
Talk to your audience before you launch. Build a persona in Audience Planner, then in Ask Alli upload a creative for an upcoming campaign (or an old one) and ask:
What do you like and dislike about this creative? How could it be improved? What should I avoid?
You hear how that audience might react before you spend anything on it.
That's it for this month.
Thanks for reading,
Nathan and the Alli team