Connecting a Shopper’s Cyber Footprint to Your Store’s Foot Traffic: Part 2

Commercial Real Estate

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Digital

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Commercial Real Estate

Digital

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3 min read

For part 2 of Jay Friedman’s series, dive into the second myth of online advertising. Take it away, Jay.

Myth #2: I don’t know enough about my customers to identify them online.

Reality: Any business that knows its customers’ names can match results back to digital media.

For most retailers, offline data is collected and stored in a CRM system, loyalty program or email marketing platform that ties customers to some form of personally identifiable information (PII), such as an email address, name, postal address, or customer ID. Today’s technology allows us to scrub CRM data of all PII through an algorithmic hash process, protecting users’ anonymity. Then by establishing the right data connections and algorithms, we can now match that data to credit and bank card data, as well as cookie IDs across devices to track digital ad campaigns and their effectiveness at influencing in-store visits all the way through actual purchasing decisions. Advertisers can then run more targeted online ads based on consumers’ purchasing histories.

Today’s technology allows us to scrub CRM data of all PII through an algorithmic hash process, protecting users’ anonymity. Then by establishing the right data connections and algorithms, we can now match that data to credit and bank card data, as well as cookie IDs across devices to track digital ad campaigns and their effectiveness at influencing in-store visits all the way through actual purchasing decisions. Advertisers can then run more targeted online ads based on consumers’ purchasing histories.

While every sale is not yet attributable, the results generated by measuring the lift of exposed consumers versus a control group is statistically significant enough to allow marketers to feel confident in the findings and further optimize the next campaign. From there, results can be matched directly to the original dollar amount of the digital media buy compared to the total ad spend for a particular campaign. More importantly, these results can be pivoted to understand the impact of frequency, message sequencing or different creative treatments.

Want to learn more? Continue on to the final myth of online attribution best practices in Part 3.