A recent survey by xAd indicated that a lack of clear ROI was holding some marketers back from a more aggressive use of mobile advertising and location-based mobile ads in particular. The question was: “What is the biggest factor holding back brands from spending on mobile location advertising?” Inability to measure ROI/campaign performance was the largest obstacle identified.
Location analytics provider Placed has one answer to that problem. While a number of companies, including Google, can now measure store visits after ad exposures, Placed’s new Revenue product (an adjunct of its Placed Attribution offering) seeks to directly connect ad exposures to in-store sales.
The company does this with its large opt-in panel of mobile users who are rewarded for their participation and feedback. Effectively, this is a comScore or Nielsen panel for the real world (it’s only a question of time before Placed is acquired by one of these or one of the big ad platforms or agency holding companies).
Placed tracks mobile ad exposures and their impact on store visits. It then follows up with a mobile survey for store visitors to ask whether people bought anything and how much they spent. In some cases, Placed also factors in third-party data.
From all this data, the company has created a number of real-world in-store metrics:
Purchase Rate: Store Visit to Purchase
Average Spend: Average Purchase Size
Efficiency: Dollars Spent Per Visit
It also has created indexes for each of these categories to compare retailer performance. Below are the inaugural data and rankings.
Costco ranked as both the most efficient retailer (most revenue per store visit), and also as having the highest average basket size. The “dollar stores” have the highest visit-to-purchase rate, followed by warehouse club stores.
Clearly, there is a range of factors playing in the relative performance of these stores, including brand, customer experience and prices. The larger point, however, is that mobile marketers can now measure both store visits (again, many are working on this) and actual sales.
That should alleviate and ultimately eliminate the ROI question when it comes to mobile ad impact on metrics that matter.
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