Mobile advertising platform 4INFO has announced a deal with shopper targeting and analytics provider Kantar Shopcom. It offers brands the ability to measure the incremental impact of digital media on in-store sales at the SKU level.
A number of companies, including Google, are now measuring store visits after exposure to digital ads. The Kantar-4INFO relationship involves tracking the impact of ads on in-store sales by product category (e.g., 501 jeans). Facebook also has an offline sales tracking capability with Conversion Lift Measurement and Custom Audiences.
Kantar Shopcom has aggregated sales data, which it purchases from retailers, and can match that data with household and device data captured and maintained by 4INFO. Like some of the others tracking online to offline visits, the methodology is “control and exposed.” Kantar and 4INFO work with brands to target and measure impact for individual campaigns.
The partnership can tell brands such as Levi’s, hypothetically, which online or mobile ads (or ad creative) impacted in-store sales of 501 jeans, for example. It’s pretty compelling stuff from a brand marketer perspective.
This data can then be factored back into media buying and audience targeting. This approach also works with cross-screen analytics; 4INFO captures and passes cross-screen data to Kantar. The analysis can provide visibility on whether online or mobile ads were more effective in driving offline sales.
I asked 4INFO CEO Tim Jenkins how brands would use this capability as a practical matter and whether this would be done with every campaign. Jenkins said that often brands will test and validate their media buying and then proceed without measuring every campaign. But he added that many brands will use this approach on a regular though periodic basis (e.g., every third campaign) to make sure that ads are have an in-store impact on sales.
Jenkins and I discussed how these online-to-offline visits/sales analytics were becoming more widely used and desired by brands and retailers as they seek to measure true ROI or ROAS. He said that in the CPG context, brands were demanding offline sales impact data now as a standard metric.
Kantar Shopcom and 4INFO’s Retail Product Segments offering incorporates data “from 175 million unique consumers from 32,000+ retailers in shopping centers across the US. The SKU-level data represents 15+ retail sectors and 300+ retail categories . . . and comprises 55,000,000 products.”
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