In the world of local advertising, where budgets are smaller and every dollar matters, understanding the impact of your campaigns is crucial.
One key metric that can provide valuable insights into the success of your digital marketing efforts is foot traffic attribution.
This innovative measurement tool allows advertisers with physical store locations to connect the dots between their digital advertising campaigns and in-store visits, providing a clearer picture of campaign performance. This is particularly useful for CTV advertising, where audiences take action in ways that are less trackable.
In this article, we will delve into the world of foot traffic attribution, exploring what it is, why it's important, and how to effectively implement it in your local advertising strategy.
Imagine launching a digital ad campaign and being able to trace the number of footsteps it led into your store. Foot traffic attribution is a method of measurement that connects the digital and physical worlds, offering a tangible metric for how online advertising influences offline behavior. By tracking the journey of consumers from viewing an ad to walking into a physical location, this method reveals the effectiveness of specific marketing strategies in driving real-world actions.
This insight is not just a number — it's a story about what resonates with your audience, guiding you to refine your approach, better align your messaging, and ultimately, enhance your connection with the community you serve.
It might sound like magic, but smartphones are what make foot traffic attribution possible.
Using a CTV ad as an example, here’s what happens throughout the foot traffic measurement process:
With the correct technology in your corner, it’s actually quite easy to measure foot traffic that can be attributed to your digital marketing. And once you have the data, you can analyze it for useful insights.
For advertisers navigating the murky waters of marketing efficacy, this powerful tool offers a direct line of sight into the tangible effects of digital campaigns on in-store visits.
For local businesses striving to maximize their reach within the community, understanding the correlation between an ad viewed on a screen and a customer's decision to visit in person is invaluable. It not only affirms the relevance and resonance of your marketing messages but also equips you with the data to prove it.
Moreover, foot traffic attribution is instrumental in refining your advertising strategy. It sheds light on which creatives, platforms, and messages are truly moving the needle, guiding you towards more effective and efficient campaign designs. This level of clarity empowers advertisers to allocate their budgets more wisely, focusing on strategies that drive real-world results.
In essence, embracing foot traffic attribution is not just about keeping pace with the evolving digital landscape; it's about staying ahead of it. It provides a clearer understanding of your campaign's ROI, ensuring that every marketing move you make is backed by solid, data-driven insights.
For local advertisers aiming to make every advertising effort count, foot traffic attribution is not just important — it's indispensable.
As noted above, the number one requirement for using foot traffic attribution is leveraging a technology platform that enables it. But there’s more to it than just that.
Not every business with a physical location is a fit for foot traffic measurement. Law offices, for example, don’t receive enough organic visits to warrant this methodology. Typically we recommend that businesses have at least 25 visitors per day to their store, and the industries that can most likely benefit are automotive, fast food, entertainment, and retail.
Make sure you’re targeting your ads correctly to audiences that have a high likelihood of visiting your stores. Focus on high-traffic areas where your ads will not just be seen but acted upon; if you serve a broad region, consider running specific line items for the zip codes nearest your physical locations so you can more easily track high-potential audiences for foot traffic.
Make sure you integrate a compelling call-to-action (CTA) within your creatives to encourage potential customers to make the leap from the digital sphere into your physical storefront. Offering a perk for coming in can be a great motivator.
You also need to decide on an attribution window, the timeframe in which a store visit should be attributed to your campaign. If you want to show direct action, for example, you can keep this window short, like 14 days. If you’re curious about broader influence, you can extend this window to a longer timeframe.
The biggest reason to track foot traffic is to learn and ensure your campaigns are structured to succeed. When reviewing performance, you can usually view two things: the date when the conversion happened, and the date when the impression happened that led to the conversion. Both carry value, but we recommend focusing on the impression date to determine how to effectively structure your campaigns.
For example, let’s say Advertiser X runs a relatively even distribution of impressions Sunday through Thursday, then tapers their media down on Friday and Saturday when TV viewing is lower. Now let’s say these impressions drive a total of 4 visits to the store, which all occur on Friday and Saturday when people are more likely to be shopping.
If you’re only analyzing the days when conversion happens, it might look like Friday and Saturday are the most effective days for your campaign. If you look at impression dates, however, you might find that those visits were generated from impressions that occurred on Wednesday and Thursday, and you’d be better suited to structure your campaigns to deliver more heavily on those days of the week.
Tracking by impression date is also valuable because you have more insight into other dimensions that provide telling insights, like creative, publisher, device, time of day, and more.
You can track visits by exact address and DMA, which is helpful if you have more than one physical store that you’re targeting. You can also see if there’s a geo-radius where viewers are more likely to make a trip to the store vs. stay home, and adjust future campaigns accordingly.
By providing concrete insights into how digital efforts translate to in-store visits, foot traffic attribution is a powerful tool that enables businesses to refine strategies, optimize budgets, and connect more effectively with their community. Local businesses can use foot traffic attribution to ensure that their marketing efforts are not just seen, but are truly impactful.
