S3
Episode 7
Footfall Attribution: From Digital Ads to In-Store Traffic
About This Episode
Ever wondered how digital efforts can lead to in-store conversions? We break down how digital efforts can drive traffic to a brick-and-mortar location, and how to measure results with footfall attribution.
Jean-Philippe Guay | Account Director, North Strategic
Allie Shaffer | Account Manager, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
Impressions, clicks, and videos are not necessarily measurements that are tied to business results. They are great engagement, but it’s not because you watch a video, or it’s not because you click on an ad that you’ll buy a product. So we really need to understand better the attribution we need to integrate data with online purchases with in-store conversion. So we can overlap how many people went in-store, and what is the in-store conversion to better understand the shift in behaviour and being able to optimize for the real business results.
How Agencies Thrive Introduction (00:00:29)
But then you think about the social landscape, the research and data is hugely significant when we combine all of these different touchpoints that long-term loyalty and then diving into the clicks to leads to sales, gotten to a point where it can drive better results in audience targeting, and really is what’s going to set you apart. You’re tuning in, you’re tuning in, you’re tuning to the How Agencies Thrive podcast.
Matt (00:00:53)
Hello, and welcome to the How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Matt, and I’m the Education Development Manager at StackAdapt. And today, we have a very special episode centered around marketing attribution, and specifically football attribution. So if you’ve ever been curious as to how you can relate campaign impressions or conversions to actual store visits, this episode is for you. Joining us today is JP from North Strategic, a Canadian PR firm. And of course, StackAdapt’s very own Allie Shaffer. As always, we’re going to have our guests introduce themselves. So starting with you, JP, we’d love to hear about North Strategic, what you do and some of your areas of expertise.
JP (00:01:33)
Yeah, sure. So I’m JP, Director of Digital at North Strategic. And North Strategic is a full service PR agency with digital paid media and content capabilities. So we are coast to coast in Canada. And as you can hear from my accent, I’m from Montreal, the French part of Canada.
Matt (00:01:53)
Fantastic. Now, JP, what are some areas of expertise that you have in your space?
JP (00:01:59)
Yeah, so basically, I just evolved throughout the marketing landscape in the past 10 years, and added several practice to my expertise.
Matt (00:02:11)
Fantastic. Now, over to you, Allie. Let’s hear a little bit about you and your role at StackAdapt and some of your areas of expertise.
Allie (00:02:20)
Great. Thanks, Matt. Yes, my name is Allie Schaffer. I’ve been with StackAdapt coming up on two years now. My role is I’m an account manager team lead on our Client Services team. As far as areas of expertise, I was lucky enough to have a background in not only retail, but also agency work that I did prior to joining StackAdapt. So I have a lot of insight into the retail space, as well as CPG and other verticals like that. But right now am working at StackAdapt. My, you know, my work and expertise spans a whole bunch of different verticals, which is really great for me to be able to have my hand in.
Matt (00:02:57)
Awesome. Well, it’s great to have both even on the episode. So jumping into it. As I mentioned at the beginning, the theme of this episode is marketing attribution, and more specifically, we’re gonna be talking about footfall attribution. Now from both of you, to help our listeners best understand this concept, how would you describe footfall attribution? What is it and why is it something important for marketers to be paying attention to?
JP (00:03:23)
Yeah, if I may start so footfall attribution or some people refer it as foot traffic attribution is a measurement that refers to the number of people who visited a specific location, such as a shop at car dealership or restaurant after seeing an ad. And I think like, it’s great. And traditionally, we referred to impressions and online conversion. But sometimes you have some clients that have only actual stores brick and mortar, and it helps to understand how digital ads contribute to their business results when you are able to track foot traffic in a brick and mortar location, especially when, you know, with all the rewards program that exists in this world, sometimes you are able to digitalize your footprint, but sometimes it’s harder for some client to be able to fully track the conversion. And that’s a great way to be able to measure the ROI of your campaign in the real world.
Allie (00:04:32)
Awesome. Yeah, no, I completely agree. I think the only thing that I would add to that is that you know, as we’re seeing the trend happen currently, in like the retail space, for example, a lot of what people are doing still does happen online, and a lot of that I know trend wise is moving more towards online. But the last metric I recently saw looks like still 80 to 90% of retail sales happen outside of being online. So this is just another tactic and tool, but by being able to tie an actual visit to the media that you’re running, to be able to really get that holistic view of how your media efforts are impacting not only people on the internet, but also people that are, you know, going around living life and are aware of your brand outside of the digital space.
Matt (00:05:17)
Awesome. Now, as you mentioned that Allie, I have a question that we didn’t we didn’t discuss ahead of time. But thinking about the last couple of years with the pandemic, and sort of what happened where everyone went from shopping in-store to then having to shop online, not having the option to go in-store and then going back in-store, was there a huge kind of uptick in people wanting to use footfall attribution or other types of attribution studies to now measure this new lift that they were going to be discovering? I know that there was some talk about this last year during the holiday season because this was one of the first times that people could actually go back in-store and start shopping, is this something that you both saw happen in the industry?
Allie (00:06:02)
I know on our side, yes. Like, you know that when I was working during the pandemic, in the agency, and at StackAdapt, I did see a lot of that obviously fall off and wanting to look into other options for attribution since we were no longer able to really track people actually going to stores. I think the exciting piece here now is being able to take this data as we are slowly coming out of this global pandemic, more or less, and be able to see how some of that attribution actually changes. And if we’re seeing upticks in traffic, if we’re seeing objects and people engaging with media, and then going into a store or actual location, but curious to hear JP’s thoughts on that, too.
JP (00:06:42)
Yeah, so I think that going out of this pandemic, consumers are still super attached to brick and mortar store shopping more than ever. We see like different behaviours. So some people prefer online, but what we see is that the experience as a physical showroom is still important for many shoppers. I think, like I saw data from Nielsen the other day, and it was like 75% of grocery shoppers still visit like, physical location. And I think that 51% of people consuming online said that they still want like the in-store experience. So as an advertiser, we need to understand that mother and omni channel consumer. And we also need to understand like the behaviours and true foot traffic attribution, we are able to understand what’s the percentage of people who go in-store to shop and better understand like the importance of modern showroom.
Matt (00:07:45)
Awesome. Now on that note, and kind of jumping back to today and how things are what can footfall attribution tell us about how your audience is showing a response to your advertising effort?
JP (00:07:59)
Well, I see three topics here. So I think there are like their real world and business results. So what we discussed earlier, impressions, clicks, and videos are not necessarily measurement that are tied to business results, they are great engagement, but it’s not because you watch a video that you will buy a product or it’s not because you click on an ad that you’ll buy a product. So we really need to understand better the attribution then there are like consumers patterns. What I mean by that is that we need to integrate data with online purchases, that are made thinking like in-store conversion, so we can overlap, how many people went in-store and what is the in-store conversion to better understand like, how many people we need to drive to store and also we can also overlap with other data such as average spend in-store to better understand like, if there was like a lift in average spent in-store, and last but not least, would be footfall lift. And this is like an offering that we really like with StackAdapt because it allows us to better understand are we driving consumers that are already loyal to the brand, or are we able to add new consumer to the mix? So are we driving like from upper funnel down to lower funnel, new content, new consumers? So those are I think that three great patterns. And if I can add a fourth to it that would be being able to better understand shift in behaviour and being able to optimize for the real business results.
Allie (00:09:41)
Yeah, so I think everything that you said completely is applicable and like that’s why I think this is another really important piece for marketers to consider. Because like we said, like I had mentioned earlier, it’s really that holistic view. So like JP mentioned, being able to really understand if you’re seeing a lift from the media that we’re runningg because you know, we can always assume or think that this medium might be wasted, people are already going to go to, you know, large retailers certain-stores that they’re familiar with. But this really does drive home the point of what are we affecting, when you’re being able to basically compare a group of users who have not seen an ad to the real users who have seen an ad and whether or not they’re actually visiting the location. And this is really valuable information to provide to our clients. Since we’re able to, like JP said, drive home those business use cases and continue to tweak as we go along to make that even better if the ultimate goal is to not only drive online conversions, but also visits to a certain location.
Matt (00:10:43)
Fantastic. Well, I think now that we’ve got a clearer idea of what footfall attribution is why it’s important how it can impact your campaigns. Zooming back in here, Allie, JP, I know you both have a lot of experience within the industry. So I’m interested to know, you know, whether you want to provide names or not, what are some examples of this technology working really well? And what are some, you know, good use cases for this type of attribution technology?
JP (00:11:13)
Yeah, sure, I’d like to share the story of a client, I won’t name this client, but they have multiple retail locations across Canada, they were not able to track accurately offline or brick and mortar conversions. So we decided to, like I said that previously, measure footfall attribution and then be able to overlap on top of it, the average spend per visit and the offline conversions or in-store conversion rates. So how many people walk in and spend so after the campaign we got from StackAdapt, the data, so how many people walked in, etc, we compare the performance of our display campaign to the historical data. And basically, the report suggested that the consumer driven in-store spend 20 times more than it costs to drive them to property. And there was an increase in sales lift during that campaign. So it was quite interesting for them because it was outside of key retail moments. So we were able to better understand the value and also the impact of the display campaign outside of traditional retail moments, such as Christmas, Black Friday or back to school. So they really got interesting data on the impact of their brand campaign during that period.
Allie (00:12:42)
Yeah, no, that’s great. I think, for me, the best, you know, something that I always recommend here is consistency, right? Because this is another approach that’s very holistic, like I’ve mentioned before being able to really see a full view of what you’re impacting. So when I say consistency, I mean, the best success that I see is when we’re able to continue to run, you know, something like an always-on type campaign, maybe we make some tweaks here and there, and maybe we’re making some adjustments. But as you continue that always-on approach, you can start seeing those efficiencies come through in terms of the reporting that we’re providing to clients. So you know, for example, you know, the first poll of the data after just maybe a couple of weeks of running, or, you know, even a month, as we all know, everybody has a different journey as a customer into actually like visiting a store. So it may take a little bit longer than just that time period to actually drive them in. The great thing about it is that, as we continue to pull these, most of the time, I’m always seeing more efficiencies, lower cost per visits, and bigger lifts. Because we’re making those adjustments consistently for the campaign over that period of time, to ensure that we are driving the best success we can for our clients. And you know, consistency, always on approaches, I will always, you know, support those because that is where you’re really able to compare, make some of those really good, you know, really good analysis on all of your data to see like how you can just make it better. And then you have that solid piece of data for the future years when you’re planning as well know what changes impacted what and how you can do better going forward.
Matt (00:14:16)
Fantastic. So to end things off here, I want you both to think ahead. I call it 15 months. So between now and then the end of 2023. Not that much time, but thinking about current trends or even any speculative thoughts that both of you had, what does the future of attribution and this type of marketing technology look like?
JP (00:14:44)
Yeah, I think it’s really hard to speculate. You know, with the privacy challenges and cookie apocalypse, the landscape changed quite suddenly and in other conversion tracking methods, but I think like full footfall lift and the audience and sights we can get from foot traffic attribution will become like essential because like I said earlier, the behaviour changed quite a bit. And also, it’s, I would say, it becomes a must to prove that we can acquire net new consumers and drive like loyal consumer to stores. But also, it’s, it’s better to prove how we can increase ROI to our clients. And when it comes to insights from foot traffic. Attribution, the example I mentioned earlier, if we’re only going after a lower CPM when we analyzed like the audience that converted the most, we realized that it was not the cheapest audience. So basically, when we were able to better target, it was more expensive, but we drove a higher quality audience and we had like a higher conversion rate. So instead of spending for nothing, we were able to adjust and be more agile.
Allie (00:15:59)
Yeah, no, I definitely agree with JP, I think it’s difficult to speculate, I do see some challenges on the horizon. And obviously, some shifts, as we all know, we continue to talk about the 3rd- party cookie, the possibility of it being deprecated, and how that will impact all kinds of different things. Also, just more user awareness about what people are tracking, or were able to pull off of their phones, which is, of course, important with football attribution, it’s related to our devices. So as those things change, I think it’s going to only start to become a little bit more challenging to drive direct attribution, which is something that we’re always constantly trying to figure out, as, you know, marketers is, how do we attribute the money that we’re spending every part of the funnel towards the eventual goal, whether it be a conversion of like a purchase a walk in a lead, whatever it may be? I think as this continues to, you know, we move a little bit more into focusing on privacy away from cookies. I think things like football attribution, will have to be tweaked, obviously, in terms of some of those privacy concerns. Not that it’s not, you know, a private, it’s definitely a transparent approach. It’s just we’re having a lot more people are having a lot more control over their phones. But like I said, I think it’s something where these types of attribution studies are going to be more important than ever, to continue to attribute the importance of digital marketing, and how it is impacting a user’s entire journey through the funnel. And so yeah, I think hopefully, we just continue to grow new ways to attribute media and really tell that full story.
JP (00:17:36)
And if I can also add one other prediction, I think real-time optimization will become a thing in the future. So right now, most of the DSPs rely on third-party partners to get after the end of the campaign data. And I know some DSPs work on proper retiree tech, and will be able to track in real-time very soon footfall attribution. So that will allow us to better able to optimize during the campaign versus waiting for the next campaign.
Allie (00:18:11)
Yeah, I agree. I think that direct integration, I know that StackAdapts been working on that too to bring it in and productize it more within the platform. I think that, like you said, will be huge, because yes, you can make more decisions in flight, as opposed to having to look back at a prior campaign and make only forward changes.
Matt (00:18:27)
All right, well, JP, Allie, before we close out, I’m gonna throw both of you in audible. For any marketers that are listening to the podcast, we always like to know from our guests, what are some resources that either of you would recommend, so it could be a podcast, a blog, any kind of content that can help them stay on top of trends and be more forward-looking as marketers and advertisers.
JP (00:18:53)
I will be totally honest with you, I usually reach out to my sales reps and try to digest the information they share with me. So in the last few years, talking to many reps, including Mike at StackAdapt. Hi, Mike. I hope you’re listening. It was great because like you get insights from what is in development and you are able to then like fact check if it’s good for your clients. So I feel like most of the blog and podcast are based on past experience versus sales reps are usually more forward and allow you to be ahead of the curve.
Allie (00:19:32)
I’m a big fan of Ad Age and Ad Week. Both of those offer like a one-pager email that you can get in the morning I believe they’re called like a wake-up call. I love those simple digests. I use them also from like New York Times even just because I know we’re all super busy. It helps to have like a quick review of like what’s going on in the world and in advertising to really keep up on the trends. But then otherwise, I think really connecting with you know, clients, whether it be, you know, for us, like us with JP internally with people that we work with hearing what’s going on in their world, what their clients are concerned about, what we’re trying to solve for in the future. You know, just be curious, I think is the biggest piece. The more curiosity you have, the more that you’re going to learn and be able to continue to, you know, serve your clients better in the future, and be able to work internally to solve some of these upcoming issues.
Matt (00:20:29)
Absolutely. Well, I don’t think we could have scripted a more perfect answer that was great. I think the key there is staying curious to stay on top of things within the industry. And you never know what you might learn on a day-to-day basis. Because as we know, marketing and advertising moves at lightspeed, things change very fast,
Allie (20:48)
Always changing, all the time.
Matt (20:51)
Well, to both you this was a fantastic episode. It was great to have both of you on, get your expertise from both sides of the coin from the agency perspective, as well as the you know, StackAdapt perspective. To any of our listeners who are working in marketing, advertising, looking to get a better insight on attribution technology, we hope that you took a lot away from this episode as much as I did. So thank you to our guests. And thank you to you for listening. This has been How Agencies Thrive podcast and we’ll see you in the next episode. Take care.
Episode Outro (00:21:31)
Thank you so much for tuning in. This has been the How Agencies Thrive podcast. If you like what you heard, then there’s three things that you can do to support the show. Number one, subscribe. Number two, leave us a review. And number three, share our podcasts on social media or with anyone who might find value in this content. If you have questions or feedback or just want to learn how agencies and brands work with StackAdapt, you can find us at stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.
