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the Most comprehensive intelligence
Custom Marketplace Analysis (CMA)

Your market, your questions, your unique needs.

A fully customized, analyst-led intelligence study of everything being said about your brand, category, or issue across the open web and the AI answer engines people rely on. Calibrated to the specific business questions you need answered.

example CMA insights Web + AI engines
Marketplace signal · by theme
Untapped opportunity Act High
Positive drivers Strong
Channels & influencers mapped 28
AI answer accuracy Needs work
Emerging risk Watch

Custom-built for you. Every CMA is engineered to answer your organization’s most important strategic questions through a comprehensive analysis of your marketplace.

Tailor-made
fully customized for your business needs – never templated.
Analyst-led
social intelligence tools plus hands-on human research
Web + AI
data drawn from the open web and AI answer engines
Any window
scalable and repeatable to the cadence of your business priorities
see the complete picture

The full story – not just the scores.

A Custom Marketplace Analysis (CMA) is Metric Centric’s most comprehensive research program. We capture, aggregate, and analyze real online conversation – and the responses to questions today’s AI answer engines give – about the brands, topics, and audiences you define, then translate the patterns into insights, opportunities, and a tactical improvement plan.

Knowing where to start can be the hardest part of uncovering new opportunities. A CMA maps the marketplace, surfaces unmet needs and emerging opportunities, and provides a comprehensive view at any stage of your decision-making process. Where a scorecard tells you what is happening, a CMA explains why – and what to do next.

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Curious to see a sample CMA report? We'd like to share one with you.

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What's inside every CMA

Five areas of analysis.
Tailored to your objectives.

The scope is yours to shape, but every CMA is designed to answer the same fundamental questions: What’s being said? Who’s saying it? Where are the conversations happening? What do they mean? And what should you do next?

01

Conversation Intelligence

Understand the tone, volume, reach, and relevance of conversations shaping perceptions of your brand, competitors, or topics across the open web and AI answer engines.

02

Audience Benchmarking

Compare insights across the audience segments that matter most to your business, revealing how perceptions and behaviors differ by market, demographic, or stakeholder group.

03

Influence & Channel Mapping

Identify the channels, communities, publications, and influencers driving the conversations that matter most to your industry and target audiences.

04

Opportunity & Risk Identification

Uncover emerging opportunities, unmet needs, and reputational risks by analyzing real-world conversations before they escalate and become market trends.

05

Strategic Recommendations

Receive analyst-led recommendations tailored to your objectives, helping you strengthen messaging, expand audience reach, and make more informed business decisions.

need something more specific?

We’ll tailor the analysis to your priorities. If the conversation exists, we can analyze it.

Scope your CMA →
How a CMA comes together

Custom by design.
Rigorous by method.

Every CMA is engineered around your objectives. We combine conversational data, AI answer engine analysis, and analyst-led research to collect, organize, and interpret the signals that matter most. Patterns become insights. Insights become strategic action.

01 · Define

Scope your questions

We set the parameters together – brands, competitors, topics, audiences, and geographies – around the questions you need answered.

02 · Capture

Listen everywhere

We collect conversational data across the open web and how AI answer engines respond to questions about you, competitors and market issues that matter.

03 · Analyze

Find the patterns

Recurring patterns across conversations and content are identified, validated against supporting data, and separated from the noise – revealing the insights that matter most.

04 · Deliver

Insights & Actions

Every CMA delivers a benchmarked understanding of your market, analyst-led recommendations, and a repeatable framework for measuring change over time.

Why we include AI answer engines: Buyers increasingly turn to AI before they go to your website. A CMA examines how answer engines represent your brand today – accurately or not – so AEO becomes part of your communications strategy from the outset. Analysis combines conversations across the open web with AI-generated responses, typically covering the previous 12–18 months and targeted to the markets, regions, or geographies most important to your business.

When teams commission a CMA

One engagement.
Endless possibilities.

A CMA provides the comprehensive intelligence to move your business forward with confidence. Revisit the analysis over time to measure change against your original benchmark and uncover new opportunities as markets evolve.

Find your next opportunity

Identify pain points and unknown opportunities when you’re deciding where to grow, expand, or reposition next.

Build your strategy

Replace guesswork with intelligence. Begin with a holistic, benchmarked view of your marketplace and the forces shaping it.

Measure progress over time

Revisit your original benchmark to measure change, validate strategic decisions, and demonstrate the impact of your work.

choose the right analysis

Need a quick benchmark –
or the complete blueprint?

Scorecards deliver focused intelligence around a specific question. The CMA expands that foundation into a fully customized marketplace analysis, revealing the broader context, underlying drivers, and strategic opportunities shaping your business.

The scorecard-to-CMA path

From What's Happening to Why It Matters.

Start with a Social Intelligence Scorecard to see where you stand, then upgrade to a Custom Marketplace Analysis to drill into the drivers behind every score – and we’ll credit everything you spent on the scorecard toward the CMA.

Talk through your options →
Proof it works

Real organizations.
Real decisions.

See how organizations used a Custom Marketplace Analysis to uncover opportunities, validate strategy, and turn marketplace intelligence into action.

All case studies

Ready to answer your biggest
business questions?