It is common to find local business owners who are skeptical of digital advertising’s impact on real world results, largely because digital metrics like clicks and impressions don’t clearly demonstrate that advertising actually drives in-store visits, purchases, and revenue.
Digital advertising is good at measuring consumer behavior online, but local businesses ultimately need to measure how it impacts consumer behavior offline.
Some of the biggest reasons for this skepticism include:
- Attribution is difficult. A restaurant, retailer, salon, or local service business may recognize that sales increased, but it is difficult to prove that a particular Facebook, Google, display, or video ad caused the customer to visit.
- Digital metrics don’t feel like business results. Impressions, clicks, CTR, and video views can sound impressive, but a business owner ultimately cares about customers, appointments, calls, visits, and revenue.
- Most digital exposure doesn’t produce an immediate response. Someone may see an ad several times, remember the business, and visit two weeks later; or simply be influenced by the ad without ever clicking it.
- The customer journey is increasingly fragmented. A consumer might see an ad on Instagram, search Google later, read reviews, visit the website, and eventually walk into the store. The business often sees only the final transaction.
- They have previously experienced poor digital advertising. Some local businesses have been sold generic programmatic campaigns or boosted posts with little strategic targeting. After paying for campaigns that produced questionable results, they become understandably wary of the entire category.
- Digital advertising can create the wrong expectation. If it’s sold as ‘clicks’ or ‘leads’ the owner may expect immediately measurable sales. But much of the value of digital advertising, particularly local display, video, and social, is awareness, consideration, and eventual conversion, not necessarily an immediate click or sale.
Closing this measurement gap is of keen interest to local marketers.
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There are several ways to connect digital marketing activity to brick-and-mortar outcomes. The strongest approach is usually to combine multiple methods rather than rely on a single attribution model.
- Use location-based measurement to estimate whether people exposed to digital campaigns subsequently visited your store.
- Geofencing/Location Measurement: Compare store visits among people exposed to ads vs. a control group.
- Radius Targeting: Target people near stores and measure subsequent visitation.
- Mobile Location Data: Useful for larger scale campaigns, though privacy and data-quality considerations matter.
- Connect digital ads to transactions. If you associate a digital identifier with an in-store purchase, you can get much closer to true revenue attribution.
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- Email or phone numbers
- Digital coupons
- App IDs
- “Buy online, pick up on store” orders
- Credit/debit transaction data
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- Use unique offers or promo codes. Give different audiences/campaigns unique codes that can be redeemed in-store.
- Measure online behavior preceding store purchases. Even when you can’t identify the exact individual, you can look for relationships between digital activity and store sales.
- Geography-based holdout tests. One of the best methods for proving incrementality is to deliberately withhold advertising from comparable geographic areas. If the markets are sufficiently comparable, you can estimate incremental effects.
- Connect digital marketing to loyalty data. If you’re a retailer with a loyalty program, this can be one of the most effective approaches.
- Use ‘near-store’ campaigns. Run campaigns specifically around physical locations and measure outcomes. You can vary spend across stores/locations and look for a relationship between incremental media pressure and incremental sales.
To name a few.
Here at Sentinel Solutions, we can build measurement into your campaign from the beginning. Tactics including unique landing pages, offer codes, QR Codes, call tracking, appointment tracking, CRM integration, and more. Ultimately, we’ll look to discover your marketing cost per acquired customer and revenue generated.
For larger, more complex multimedia campaigns here at Sentinel Solutions, we utilize a data platform called Placer.ai which is a location/foot traffic analytics platform that helps businesses understand what is happening in the physical world, especially where people go, how often they visit, where they come from, and how visitation changes over time. Placer.ai uses aggregated location data from mobile devices and machine-learning models to estimate things such as: Visits to a store or location, foot traffic trends, visitor demographics and behaviors, and more.
There are no personal identifiers included in the data, all is aggregated.
Closing the measurement gap.
The ability to connect digital marketing activity with brick-and-mortar performance has expanded significantly through tactics such as those shared above. Together, these approaches provide a much clearer view of how digital investment drives physical visits, purchases, and ultimately incremental revenue and profit.
The benefit is not only better attribution and ROI measurement, but also the opportunity to optimize media spend by market, understand customer behavior, and make more informed decisions about promotions and growth opportunities.
If you’d like to learn more about marketing attribution and how to improve the effectiveness and transparency of your marketing strategy, please give us a call or email us here at Sentinel Solutions.
We are experts in these tactics and can assist you in incorporating them effectively into your marketing plan. We can help you build compelling campaigns that engage your audience and drives sales.
Give us a call if we can help at 603-352-5896 or e-mail to Advertising@SentinelDigitalSolutions.com. We’re here to help you succeed.
Disclosure: This post was curated with AI assistance.
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