Make sure you don’t lose track of where your customers are located. Store traffic solutions are growing in popularity as an option to support sales and retail marketing, with an ever-growing number of options in multiple media channels that allow for store traffic measurement and attribution reporting.
Based on research made by Google/Kantar in 2021, where both the online and physical channels were compared to understand trends and ways to support businesses and increase sales, an average of 20% of the total ad-supported sales are made in-store, while over 50% are made through online channels, numbers that may vary depending on the category.
In addition, according to 2022 data from eMarketer, bricks-and-mortar stores made a comeback in terms of physical locations, with sales in 2021 growing by 8.2% year over year, with total spending outpacing 2019, the year prior to pandemic lockdowns.
Most important media channels offer some sort of store traffic solution alongside their product offerings. Here’s a couple of very important examples of options businesses have when looking for media partners to work on boosting sales with communication focused on driving store traffic:
Meta store location features
When running awareness campaigns, Meta allows marketers to use a series of targeted CTAs, such as “Get Directions” or “Call Now”, alongside the possibility of including map location capabilities to allow users to find a nearby store where they can buy the products. These options can include addresses, phone numbers and opening hours.
Google Ads Store Traffic campaigns
Using a list of locations where a product is available, Google connects the customer’s store visit to engagements with your ad, allowing marketers to understand when a user visited the store after interacting with search engine or Performance Max ads. Reporting will give you ways to optimize toward an ROI goal and cost-per-store – visit and store visit rates.
Other advanced options include using dedicated location tracking services to track your campaign’s effect. These options will allow for store traffic measurement when users see digital ads, but they will also provide information on website visits after users see offline ads through channels such as digital out-of-home.
The most popular location data provider is Foursquare, whose capabilities allow for deduplicated, anonymous user location data, leveraging technology that helps measure the effect of advertising in traffic behavior through physical locations. Using Foursquare’s technology, marketers allow for cross-platform attribution and thorough measurement reporting to help them understand if a campaign is getting users closer to the store and, where allowed, if those users are then closing sales either in-store or digitally.
In the case that in-store is an important sales channel for your business, make sure to ask us how we can leverage these tools to support you with store location marketing!