There’s a reason many brands don’t track in-store attribution for local marketing: it’s hard. Really hard. I’m reminded of the old adage that says half the money you spend on advertising is wasted; you just don’t know which half. Similarly, half your customers walk into your store as the result of local marketing; you just don’t know which half.
Proving that someone visited your store because they saw your online local marketing efforts at some point is a complex undertaking. Most out-of-the-box attribution tools don’t make it easy to differentiate between local marketing traffic and a visit from someone who stepped out of a local restaurant and happened to see your store right across the street.
There’s also the challenge of seeing over the walled gardens of Google, Facebook, Bing and the other major platforms to compare notes. In a world of last-click attribution, it can be difficult for brands to determine which media influence had the biggest impact on their local efforts, especially when multiple touch points, both online and offline, national and local, blur your attribution model.
In truth, it’s impossible to get a perfect picture of your local marketing effectiveness. Nevertheless, there are ways to get a clear enough picture that you can form reasonable assumptions about the in-store success of your campaigns.
To help you make sense of it all, I’ve outlined some of the more effective methods for tracking local marketing in-store attribution. The most accurate method (and most expensive) would be to integrate all of the in-store attribution methods I’m about to list. But a smarter approach would be to pick and choose the right attribution models to fit your needs.
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