Skip to Main Content Carnegie Mellon University Libraries

Nielsen and NielsenIQ Datasets

This guide provides information about how to go about accessing the Nielsen datasets subscribed to by the Libraries.

                          Nielsen logo             Kilts Center logo

Overview

The Nielsen and NielsenIQ datasets at the Kilts Center for Marketing is a relationship between the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business and the Nielsen Company, and makes select Nielsen marketing datasets available to academic researchers. Only tenured and tenure-track faculty, PhD students, and post-docs - with approved projects - are eligible to gain direct access to Nielsen datasets.

Nielsen Kilts Datasets available through CMU Libraries

  • Consumer Panel Data: The Consumer Panel Data comprise a representative panel of households that continually provide information about their purchases in a longitudinal study in which panelists stay on as long as they continue to meet Nielsen’s criteria. Nielsen consumer panelists use in-home scanners to record all of their purchases (from any outlet) intended for personal, in-home use. Consumers provide information about their households and what products they buy, as well as when and where they make purchases.
  • PanelView Surveys: Complementary to the Consumer Panel Data, the Panel Views surveys contain additional data about households and their members.
  • Retail Scanner Data: Retail Scanner Data consist of weekly pricing, volume, and store environment information generated by point-of-sale systems from more than 90 participating retail chains across all US markets.
  • Ad Intel Data: Nielsen's Ad Intel Data cover advertising occurrences for a variety of media types across the United States, starting in 2010 and including annual updates. These data can be broken down by Market Code (i.e., ~200 Designated Market Areas (DMAs), which can be matched to DMAs in the Consumer Panel and Retail Scanner datasets).

For more detailed descriptions, visit Nielsen Kilts.

Eligibility, Policies, and Access

Eligibility:

  • Full-time CMU tenured and tenure-track faculty, PhD students, and postdoctoral researchers may be eligible to access the Nielsen Kilts datasets with prior approval from the Office of Sponsored Projects.
  • Non-tenure track faculty, undergraduate and masters students are not eligible to access the Nielsen Kilts datasets. In addition, the datasets cannot be used for teaching purposes and are restricted for use in approved research projects only.
  • CMU PhD students and CMU postdocs may not access data unless a full-time CMU tenured or tenure-track professor (which must be from the PhD student’s program), is registered as an advisor with Chicago Booth’s Marketing Data Center.

Policies: For more eligibility requirements and policies, please consult the Nielsen Kilt's Data Policies and get in touch with us for the Internal CMU Nielsen Data Agreement.

Access: To being the procedures for accessing these datasets, please contact Sarah Young (sarahy@andrew.cmu.edu) and Ryan Splenda (rsplenda@andrew.cmu.edu) at CMU Libraries.