Commentary

Brand & Retail Partnership: Proving Digital Influences On In-Store Traffic

Conversion measurement is integral for any type of digital advertising activation. The ability to optimize campaigns in-flight, report on successes and set up future campaigns for further success depends heavily on understanding what’s working and what’s driving conversion.  This is an easy task for brands that have a digital purchase or product readily available for consumer consumption. “Click to purchase,” “click to order” or “click to learn more” campaigns make tracking conversions easier since all consumer actions can be tracked digitally.

But what about brands that don’t have a digital end point for consumers?

Brands that require an in-store purchase, or are available at big-box stores without access to back-end sales data? Or brands that have a longer sales cycle and rely on good old-fashioned person-to-person contact for a sale?

This is where in-store measurement, also referred to as offline measurement, is critical.  The ability to identify whether or not cross-channel advertising is generating incremental store visits will show if ads are actually changing consumer behavior and driving more predictable revenue.

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Companies that provide a powerful suite of data and tools to aid in making data-driven decisions help solve this issue, offering the ability to track consumers who have viewed or interacted with digital ads and report back when that consumer enters a particular store location, effectively solving the missing connection between digital ad-serving and physically entering locations.

This type of measurement is extremely valuable to brands that don’t have a digital purchase tieback to online media. With in-store measurement, brands can show exactly how many consumers their digital ads drove to the retail location, helping to facilitate brand/retailer relationships.

A major athletic shoe brand, for example, is available in multiple online marketplaces and in multiple physical retailers. The brand can track online sales via its website, but it doesn’t receive retailer back-end sales data. In order to track how many consumers the brand is driving in-store, the company partners with a foot traffic measurement company that can showcase to the retailer how many consumers are driven into the physical location after seeing the brand’s digital ads.

Once consumers are in-store, there are factors that affect their purchase choices, such as customer service, product availability, pricing, competitive product availability, digital in-store screens, etc. -- so the athletic shoe brand can use data to track consumers and help grow its partnership with the retailer by reporting how many consumers they drove in-store.

In addition to a one-to-one tieback to digital impressions served, this data helps brands recognize the incremental value of their media. This enables brands to understand how, and at what rate, their ads are actually changing consumer behavior. They can better understand consumers who would have visited a store regardless of seeing an ad, and those who were truly influenced. The access to this real-time data allows brands to pivot mid-campaign, determine future budget allocation and decrease cost per incremental store visit.

In-store measurement is critical to digital campaign conversion success, as it provides brands and advertisers a better understanding of what is truly driving visits. Conversions can be analyzed on a deeper level -- reviewing and understanding which inventory types, creative, and even targeting segments are driving the most in-store conversions, and the highest lift in store visits. This type of measurement empowers us to ensure that our marketing dollars are working harder and smarter than ever.

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