• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 10, 2024

Foursquare, which is known for its location-based data, has developed an in-house measurement tool combining location with purchase data that measures across multiple channels and devices.

The tool, called Sales Impact, is the company’s latest feature, supported by 17 new metrics for detailed comparative analytics. It measures the entire customer journey by following the path to purchase. Then it reports on how the advertising impacts return on investments (ROIs). 

Gaining visibility into what happens after a customer visits a store has long been a difficult process, and keeping up with ever-changing customer behavior continues to challenge marketers.

Marketers have learned how to drive visitors to websites and physical stores, but what happened after that for some remain a mystery.

Michele Morelli, Head of Marketing & Communications at Foursquare, said combining both visitation and purchase data presented several challenges requiring the team to rethink how to approach attribution.

The team had to maintain accurate and up-to-date sets of real-world Points of Interest (POI), aligning “fuzzy” transaction data with real-world locations.

“Transaction records often contain incomplete or imprecise information, so we developed advanced embedding models to improve matching accuracy, ensuring we correctly connect the dots between purchase and physical locations,” Morelli said. “Scaling insights across the broader population while eliminating biases was another key hurdle, so we had to regularly validate our datasets against trusted, verifiable sources, ensuring the data remains reflective of the real world.

The extensive curation process now allows Foursquare to measure more than 450 U.S. chains across diverse industries.

Enhancing its Attribution methodology to accommodate both types of data, brands can now view entire customer journeys.

Seventy percent of shoppers abandon their shopping carts online, 96% Of people have left a physical store without making a purchase at least once, and FSQ, and 12 is the minimum number of touchpoints to turn a lead into a sale, according to many.

Despite having so many choices to buy products and services, 84.9% of retail sales in 2023 were made in-store and 72% of consumers still shop in-store every week.

Brick-and-mortar stores are far from obsolete, and measuring the effect of advertising on driving in-store visits and sales should be part of any marketer’s key performance indicators (KPIs).

The new tool is part of Foursquare Attribution, which measures ad impressions for campaigns across digital sites, social media, audio, CTV, linear TV and out-of-home.

The technology to target and monitor metrics used geolocation for logged-in customers to measure foot traffic to stores and other signals to estimate sales.