• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, September 23, 2013

To help demonstrate the relationship between mobile advertising and actual sales, Millennial Media is rolling out a new set of analytics tools that attempt to link exposure to mobile campaigns with offline shopping activity. To do this, Millennial has turned to third-party analytics partners, including Placed and Neustar.

With location-tracking firm Placed, the mobile ad network plans to show the impact of a mobile campaign on foot traffic to a given retail location. The Placed Attribution platform uses the company’s panel of 100,000 opted-in users whose behaviors the company tracks as they move in and out of over 100 million discrete locations a day.

The metrics from the opt-in panel will be integrated with a mobile campaign on Millennial’s network to determine which of the opted-in devices were exposed to an ad and then track whether the user entered the advertised location.

In tandem with Neustar, Millennial will offer a service showing the total credit card spend at a retail outlet resulting from a mobile campaign, including the number of transactions per purchaser and total basket size. Offline consumer data from the Neustar’s AdAdvisors database comes from a claimed 119 million U.S. households.

Another new measure will show the impact of a campaign on traditional brand metrics, such as awareness, intent, consideration, and recall. For each of the three offerings in Millennial’s “Omni Measurement Solutions” suite, it will match unique mobile identifiers against exposed and control groups to gauge the effectiveness of campaigns with target audiences.

The mobile ad network expects to add more analytics tools in the coming weeks through an alliance with comScore. The new partnerships build on the relationships with more than 20 third-party data providers that Millennial gained through its recent acquisition of Jumptap. The company is clearly intent on convincing marketers that advertising on its network pays off as it vies with mobile ad giants like Facebook and Google.

Facebook is also focused on demonstrating a link between online and mobile advertising and offline sales. Earlier this week, the social network introduced a new measurement tool aimed at telecom companies that shows, on an anonymous basis, which users switched devices or carriers after viewing an industry ad.