Branding to Store Benchmark Study: On Average It Costs Just $6 to Drive a Consumer to Store

Renaud Biet

September 19, 2018

Until now there has been almost no investment in testing the returns generated by mobile advertising. We, therefore, wanted to demonstrate the effectiveness of this channel that we were seeing in the numerous successful campaigns run on our Hawk Demand-Side Platform (DSP).

To do that we chose our drive-to-store tool, ‘Branding To Store’, a powerful mobile advertising solution for retailers wanting to drive customers to their outlets and FMCG brands that need to attract consumers to stores that stock their products.

Measuring success

Six months after its launch in April, we published the results of the first-ever benchmark study into campaigns using Branding To Store. The objective was to offer much-needed transparency in the form of insight on the performance and effectiveness of drive-to-store mobile ad formats. DMEXCO 2018 was the ideal opportunity to present our findings to the ad tech community.

The topline results are encouraging:

On average it costs just $6 of mobile advertising to drive a consumer to store
Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays are the best days to generate store visits
Expandable mobile banners and interstitials are the most effective mobile ad formats

In addition, we found that for the campaigns run during this study, it required on average 17,000 ad impressions to drive a user to store, equating to a 0.06% visit rate. Even more encouraging is that it took only 20 clicks on an ad (on average) for a consumer to visit a store.

Under the bonnet

To look at why Branding To Store has been able to generate these results, it’s important to understand how it works.

In summary, it is the first mobile advertising solution that combines the automated creation of a drive-to-store ad format with the ability to measure the real-time uplift in footfall traffic resulting from the campaign.

We built this unique feature in response to the needs of our retail brand clients and the agencies representing some of these brands. Since being launched, it has been used by a variety of advertisers across a range of vertical sectors to drive audiences and customers to events, shops and other points of interest.

Branding To Store simplifies the creative process by enabling advertisers to build their ad directly within the advertising platform – and is the only product of its kind to do this. Data (from adsquare) and analysis separates organic store visits from those generated directly by the mobile ad, giving retailers a true figure for their return on advertising investment.

The offering also provides the consumer with a new mobile shopping experience. Once they have engaged with a brand message, the rich media ad format offers features such as a GPS map showing the best route from their current location to their nearest store or retail outlet.

Read More: Have We Lost Sight of Viewability?

Creative mobile advertising works

Put very simply, the more engaging the ad, the more clicks it generates, which translates into a greater number of physical store visits.

Mobile advertising opens up unprecedented opportunities for retailers as consumers increasingly use mobile devices in every part of their daily life. Branding To Store combines programmatic, creativity, transparency and efficiency in one place, making it easy to run campaigns that deliver results.

About the Benchmark Study

TabMo analyzed the results of 55 programmatic campaigns delivered between 1 March and 30 August 2018 on its DSP Hawk using adsquare’s footfall measurement tools.

These were split across 13 vertical sectors (as defined by the IAB): alcohol, automotive, beauty, business, buying and selling cars, clothing, food and drink, health, hobbies and interests, national parks, travel, shopping, and style and fashion.