MarketCheck's platform captures and tracks the complete lifecycle of an OEM incentive offer, from its initial discovery to its eventual expiration. This guide explains the daily process and the key date fields that manage an offer's status in our system.
Our daily crawl engine continuously monitors OEM websites to manage the lifecycle of each incentive listing. This process ensures that the data in our API and feeds accurately reflects the current offers available from manufacturers.
When our crawler finds a new incentive on an OEM website for a specific zip code, it creates a new listing in the MarketCheck database. This listing represents the offer's presence at that particular location and serves as the starting point for its lifecycle.
On subsequent daily crawls, if the same offer is found for the same zip code, we update its status_date to the current timestamp. The scraped_at_date, which marks its first discovery, remains unchanged. This daily "heartbeat" confirms the offer is still active.
The lifecycle ends when an offer is either removed from the OEM site or its terms are changed.
status_date. Because our API and data feeds only expose listings updated within the last 24 hours, the expired offer is automatically removed from active results.You can track an offer's lifecycle using two distinct sets of date fields: those managed by MarketCheck and those sourced from the OEM offer text.
These fields are populated by our crawling system to track an offer's status.
scraped_at_date: The timestamp when MarketCheck first discovered the offer for a specific zip code. This value remains constant throughout the offer's lifecycle.status_date: The timestamp when MarketCheck last verified the offer on the OEM website. This value is updated daily as long as the offer remains active and unchanged.YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ssZ)These fields are extracted directly from the offer's text and represent the validity period defined by the manufacturer.
valid_from: The start date of the incentive program as specified by the OEM.valid_through: The end date of the incentive program as specified by the OEM.MM/DD/YYYY), as this is how they typically appear in the source offer text.OEMs generally introduce new incentive programs on a quarterly or monthly basis. Because MarketCheck crawls OEM sites daily, you can be confident that any changes, updates, or new programs are captured promptly and made available in our API and data feeds the following day.
All expired offers are retained in our historical incentives dataset, which may be offered as a separate product in the future.