Want to measure how your customers’ offline purchases are influenced by online activities? Find out how footfall measurement can help.
According to CBRE research, offline sales in Asia Pacific will still account for the majority of retail sales (65%) by 2026. Meaning that retailers need to adopt an omnichannel strategy to continue to reach their customers, both online and offline.
And, as we mentioned in this article, footfall measurement is one of the many ways that you can bridge the gap between offline and online strategies.
How does footfall measurement work?
Footfall measurement is the measurement of the number of people who have visited a specific location, such as a retail store. Giving you insights into customer behaviour and how your individual campaigns are performing against in-store metrics.
There are a number of steps you need to establish in order to collect the right footfall data, and analyse it to gain actionable insights.
1) Establish measurable goals
As with any marketing activity, before you start tracking your footfall you need to be clear about what goal(s) you want to achieve from your campaigns.
For example, are you looking to maximise a seasonal campaign? Drive more traffic to a sale? Increase the amount of customers in a particular category? Drive customers to a particular store? Grow the lifetime value of your customers?
Establishing clear, measurable goals will enable you to identify which metrics are important, and track their progress more reliably.
2) Collect data
The first step in footfall attribution is to collect data about your campaigns and what happens in-store. To start, a consumer needs to see a campaign online. Then, when they visit your store, their visit will need to be tracked using a partner with access to location data provided by the consumer’s phone.
Importantly, this collection and processing of data must always be legal and consented.
3) Analyse data and plan
Once you have collected the data, it will need to be analysed in order to correlate the visit uplift between users who have seen your ads against a control group who have not. Then, you can draw out actionable insights that will enable you to maximise your next campaign.
4) Utilise and personalise
And now that you have this data, use it. We know that personalised ads have a higher rate of engagement than generic ads, so it’s a no-brainer to segment your customers and tailor their ads – not just to their demographics, but to their specific preferences and where they are in your customer journey or funnel. If you are running a DCO campaign with a partner like Crimtan, this will be simple.
You can also encourage loyalty and repeat purchases by tempting customers with tailored offers and rewarding them for repeat visits.
Two important things footfall measurement can tell you
So now that we have a general idea of why footfall measurement is important. Let’s look at some of the specific benefits retailers can achieve with it.
1) Identify which media is working best for you
Today, brands understand the power of omnichannel campaigns, which presents both opportunities and problems – the biggest being which of the many media options should they spend their finite budget on.
For example, your campaign may run across numerous channels, such as native, display, video, connected TV (CTV), digital out of home (DOOH) and audio.
Used properly, footfall measurement will help you to understand which online touchpoints are driving consumers into your stores, and enable you to tweak your campaigns accordingly. With more specific insight into what media is driving a greater return on ad spend (ROAS), you can upweight your budget in that area, and increase your results.
2) Learn more about your customers
Footfall measurement gives you valuable insights into how consumers behave offline, including:
- Cost per visit
- Which stores they visit versus your competitors
- How long they spend in your stores
- What days and times they visit
- How frequently they visit
- Audience insights such as demographics and devices used
This information will enable you to make more strategic business and marketing decisions.
How Crimtan can help you with footfall measurement
We can measure the impact of your digital campaigns with footfall A/B testing measurement reports, and geo-fence competitors stores to measure cross-over.
To get started, we ask you to provide us with the brands and competitor locations you would like to measure.
The campaign is then set live and optimised based on the client’s KPIs. We measure devices that have seen the ad and gone into the stores (A/B testing with control groups). One to two weeks after the campaign ends, we provide you with a footfall report.
Here’s a quick example of how we did it for a global furniture store client, who wanted to drive online sales and footfall traffic to 12 stores around Japan.
The campaign ran for a month in May 2023 and here’s what we learned:
- The cost per visit was USD $0.05
- The campaign produced a 15.03% visit uplift (compared to the control group)
- Mobile captured the most visits (72.6%)
- 66.14% of total visitors were male
- The most popular age group was 18-24 (45.15% of total visitors)
- Three main competitors were identified, one of which has a large overlap with this client’s audience, implying that customers tend to shop at both brands
Want to find out how footfall measurement can bridge the gap between your offline and online strategies? Get in touch and we’ll be happy to share more details with you.