How Do You Measure Retail Attribution?

Retailers are always hunting for ways to generate new in-store shoppers. To find those shoppers, they advertise to previous customers, service customers, consumers living near the store and also establish a presence on both television and radio. The theory is that the more consumers reached, the more likely they are to drive someone to visit a store.

The trick, of course, is linking marketing spend of a specific advertising channel to a purchase. Understanding the return on investment for each channel of acquisition is key for every marketer; however, in order to do that you need to know the identity of that customer in order to evaluate where they have been and what attributes may correlate with the purchases they make.

A major mall retailer chain with locations in the Midwest and Southeast engaged with Semcasting in order to do an onboarding of purchase transaction data greater than $500 in store visits over the course of 3 months. The plan was to serve targeted advertising to known customers and a control group of look-a-likes.

There were a total of 25 stores that provided customer data for onboarding. Each of the stores had a Site Visitor Attribution (SVA) tag on their local website. Semcasting collected site visitors aligned to the trade area of the local stores. Using the Smart Zones patented technology, an anonymous visit was turned into a named lead.

Secondarily, web logs were provided by the regional franchise for comparison and to correlate the effectiveness of regional TV and radio. The objective was to measure whether the local store purchasers also viewed or spent time on the regional site to determine the value of ongoing corporate ad support.

The stores ran a total of 25 online advertising campaigns over the course of 3 months, returning the following results:

• Retail transactions provided: 191,000
• Stores matched in target geographies: 154,000 (81%)
• Records Semcasting matched: 128,400 (83%)
• Impressions served to matches in 3 months: 8.75 mil
• Percent of control & customers served ad impressions: 71%
• Transactions matched to store impressions: 62%
• Transactions matched to national impressions: 47%

With an 80%+ match rate to unique users the IP targeting ID was able to match and measure all of the consumers touch points: from advertising impressions, to store web site to a visit to the regional site. The study supported increased investment to the local stores as well as continuation of the regional brand support on TV and radio.

Attribution of channel marketing spend is the formula that should be applied to any marketing budget. To learn more about how attribution through IP targeting can work for your business contact us directly to set up a time to speak.