"Dollars per MM CWD" and "Volume per MM CWD" describe the efficiency of an item/brand's sales in relation to its distribution, controlling for store size like "Sales per Point of CWD" does by using CWD% in the calculation.
A product’s CWD% can be much lower in a larger geography, which is why we generally see lower distribution percentages for an item/brand in a large regional or nationwide geography than we do in the local footprint.
Sales per MM CWD is a velocity measure which accounts for this truth in a way that Sales per Point of CWD doesn’t, making it a potentially superior way of comparing the sales rates of items or brands with varying levels of distribution across geographies.
It is also recommended that Sales per MM CWD be used (rather that Sales per Point of CWD) when comparing velocity across different retailers, since a "point" of distribution is not the same in Kroger as it is in Publix, for example.
The calculation for Sales per MM CWD work like this:
SUM (Dollar Sales) / (% CWD (Max)) multiplied by (Sum (Dollar Sales-Geography Total) / 1,000,000))
So, this measure divides the total category dollars generated by the geography by 1,000,000 and multiplies the result by an item/brand's percentage of CWD. Then, it divides that result by the item/brands total sales (Dollar or Volume).
For clarification, “Dollar Sales-Geography Total” represents a geography’s total dollars generated within the specified time period. This value can be affected only by the Segment filter in Beer CMAs (named the “Wine Category Filter”/”Spirits Category Filter” in the Wine and Spirits CMAs), meaning that if you filter down to only the CIDER Segment in a Beer CMA, the value for “Dollar Sales-Geography Total” would represent only the total Cider sales for the entire geography.
The Sales per MM CWD measure asks, what is this item/brand’s dollar contribution per million dollars? How does its contribution per million stack up against competitors across geographies of different sizes? In this way, it may better account for comparing performance across geos of different sizes than Dollar Sales per Point of CWD
Circana explains that the common use of Sales per MM CWD is to determine how well an item or brand sold, controlling for its variances in distribution within the geographies of different sizes.
Circana also advises that this measure is most effectively used to examine time periods of 13 weeks or less.