Why Footfall Attribution Should be Your Focus in 2024
Retail marketing media is becoming increasingly stale due to an over-reliance on outdated techniques that are increasing in cost. Marketers have enjoyed considerable success over the last few years, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, yet now industry players are often finding themselves in the intellectual doldrums. Footfall attribution is the best technique that we can use to break out from this malaise.
Let’s remind ourselves that advertisers are now paying considerably more for lead generation, especially in the retail industry. The average conversion rate in this sector among all channels currently stands at 3%, and the average cost per lead is approaching $35, posing a considerable challenge to many industry players. The solution has been to diversify our options via omnichannel marketing; a good start to be sure, but we can go further.
Some advertisers have had to focus more on the fundamentals of lead generation. The aim here has been to optimize the steps down their sales funnel with better services, a customer-oriented approach, loyalty programs, and so on. However, by doing so, they often miss out on increasing their customer insights. To balance out this shortcoming we are able to use polling to achieve a balance between quantity and quality, but there is a better alternative.
Finding the Best and Balanced Approach
Footfall attribution is a method by which advertisers understand the impact of their digital marketing campaigns by tracking a customer’s journey following contact with an ad. The tools we use to measure the effectiveness of these ads can tell us everything about who viewed an ad, what demographic and audience groups they belong to, their geographical location, etc, but not much about whether they ended up visiting a store to buy advertised goods. Footfall attribution can get around this limitation as it provides data-driven insights.
This is thanks to high update frequency analysis, information about customer behavior and interests, which is then cross-referenced with footfall at retail locations. It is a proven and effective technique.
For example, we can look at a case involving a major catering firm in the U.S. When the company in question used footfall attribution by analyzing impressions served and the ad spend by individual stores, it was able to identify its top five stores with walk-in rates of between 3.4% and 4.8%. The average cost per visit of these locations was $0.06, and 1.1 million cumulative daily unique devices were reached.
How does footfall attribution work?
In order to get the most out of footfall attribution, brands need to understand how it works and use its benefits properly. By implementing measurements step by step you will be able to achieve the result you are striving for. The core parts of the process include the following:
– data collection (after seeing an online advertising campaign, a customer comes to a store, and all the visits are tracked by the system that sees users’ location provided by their phones).
– data analysis (analyze information to get an understanding regarding the visit uplift between those customers that saw the ads and those that didn’t).
– reporting (on the basis of all data analyzed, we can get valuable insights to help optimize marketing campaigns).
Customers’ behavior and buying habits change from time to time, so it’s crucial to keep up with all the latest consumer trends. Footfall attribution is an excellent tool to monitor them and effectively optimize your campaign to get positive results. It helps to understand what particular online connection points make customers visit stores, so you can increase your efforts there. This also allows you to measure return on ad spend more effectively.
While leveraging footfall attribution, marketers can monitor customers’ behavior in detail offline. Examples could well include which stores they visit and the amount of time they spend there. Apart from that footfall attribution makes it easy to measure campaigns across various channels, including video, CTT/OTT, native, display, and audio. It helps to implement multi-channel strategies with better results.
To use footfall attribution effectively, understand how engaging campaigns are, and be ahead of competitors, brands need to take the following criteria into account:
1. Brand uplift. It shows the effect of ads and how they drive customers’ visits to an offline store. Actually, this is the metric that lets us understand if our campaigns are performing well and show the relationship between your brand and its customers.
2. Visit rate. This shows the connection between ad impressions and visits to the offline store. Together with the uplift rate, this metric helps find out how many users are in the shop at a particular time and which of them came there after viewing your ad.
The Right Tool for the Job
Using footfall is both efficient and effective, and has multiple benefits:
- Detailed customer information can be gathered on a weekly/daily basis.
- Insights can be customized to create highly specific campaigns.
- You can create audience segments based on their behavior both online and offline.
- Opt-in consent data is gathered and managed with ease.
- Campaigns can be drawn up, based on store-specific data, allowing you a greater degree of flexibility.
- Confirmation about the effectiveness of your ad campaigns is simpler to ascertain.
However, while it wouldn’t be correct to say that there are points against using footfall attribution, it might not be all positive for some industry players. For example, the technique works best for companies and brands whose goods have a higher-than-average value, so discount operators for example might not be able to reap the full benefits.
Also, while footfall attribution does work well for companies with higher-than-average-value products it also performs best in stores with high sales volumes too. So, if for example, your retail outlet sells something like clothing it will work well, but less so if you deal in highly specialized or prestige items like antiques.
How can footfall attribution improve your business?
Footfall attribution improves your business by giving insights about campaign performance and the ways it can be improved. It measures your brand’s success allowing you to see clearly if your investments are bringing in the desired returns and what you need to do to increase them.
Footfall attribution shows the value you give to the consumers and the level of their engagement. Since the main task is not just to create ads, but to make them sell, tracking how many users buy these products after seeing ads shows whether they are compelling enough. Ideally, ads should provide value both to customers (when they go and buy a high-quality product) and to the business (when it gets a return on the ad spend).
If you properly use the data and information, it will give insights that can be turned into real-time actions. This also gives space for testing different ideas and approaches to find out what works better for your brand. Also, footfall attribution is about studying audience segments, and that is especially important for more successful targeting of your future campaigns.
Footfall attribution lets brands reach particular goals with no guesswork concerning the effectiveness of their ads. You get precise data with a certain quantity of in-store visits driven by ad impressions. You can dig deeper into customers’ behavior and build a stronger relationship with consumers by giving them exactly what they are looking for. Marketers can use all the benefits of footfall attribution to reach their business objectives, boost brand awareness and popularity as well as stay up-to-date with consumer trends and customers’ buying habits.
