Marketers are finally unlocking location data potentials from the mobile channel to combine online and offline campaign metrics. The age of drive-to-store campaigns is now upon the ad tech industry. Are digital marketers asking for the right campaign metrics to align with overall business objectives? Here are three best practices for any drive-to-store campaign for advertisers and media buyers to make the most of online and offline campaign attributions.

Differentiate Incremental Visits Versus Total Visits Measured

Don’t be paying for organic visits into stores! When measuring drive-to-store campaigns, put in place clear definitions between the total visits measured versus the visits measured during the campaign lifetime. If the drive-to-store campaign is based on a cost per visit basis, this should be based only on the incremental visits generated from ad impression exposures and strategic real-time targeting.

This distinction is important even during the campaign lifetime as it lets marketers optimize your media spend best on incremental visits generated to improve overall campaign ROI.

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Defining Visit Uplift Calculations 

For a big picture on whether your campaign had any impact on the total number of visits into brick and mortar stores, you should then look at the percentage of store visit uplift. This is the only way today that we can gauge campaign effectiveness. Before you launch your drive-to-store campaigns, define a controlled group of mobile devices that are the same size as the group of exposed mobile devices – users who will see the online campaign.

The difference between these two groups lets us calculate the store visit uplift percentage, which gives marketers a better idea of the overall campaign impact in terms of visits.

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Third-Party Measurements for Double Verification

Finally, when it comes to campaign effectiveness measurements, be it drive-to-store or any branding campaign, performances metrics should be double verified by independent third parties. The same technology that delivers the campaign performance, shouldn’t be measuring its own effectiveness. When running online campaigns, seek out technologies that are integrated with third-party store visit measurers to ensure that your campaign results are impartial and truly successful.

As the ad tech industry continues to mature, it is not enough just to ask for transparency. Advertisers and marketers have to go further and seek out measurements for returns on their ad investments.

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