Closing the Loop: PlaceIQ, LiveRamp Connect TV Campaigns With Location Visits

The metrics for television ads have long been pretty fuzzy — particularly when it comes to determining how much of a lift brands and retailers get from specific ad impressions. Set-top boxes and audience surveys provide proxies for identifying how many people are reached, and that can be coupled with data about sales increases to show correlations, but it’s been hard to say with much scientific accuracy whether specific TV ads send specific people into physical stores.

PlaceIQ and Acxiom’s LiveRamp are working to fix that, and have announced the results of a new consumer behavior model that connects addressable TV ads to real-world store visits. The companies conducted a number of campaigns for major brands in automotive, retail, and tourism, where they delivered targeted TV ads and then used correlated consumer mobile location data to measure real world store visitations, resulting in an average lift of 46% across the three targeted verticals. The campaigns logged a 70% lift in visits to retailers, a 50% lift in visits to auto dealerships, and a 20% increase in visits to targeted tourist destinations.

“Over the past year, since [our Place Visitation Rate] launch, we’ve continued to get inquiries about ‘How can we now extend this out to other mediums?'” PlaceIQ’s Chief Strategy Officer Derek Thompson told Street Fight. He said that by connecting store visits to addressable TV, the company had enabled a new and meaningful [key performance indicator] that marketers can use to both prove the effectiveness of their campaigns, and also adjust their strategy over time.

“It also just comes down to performance,” said Thompson. “If we can understand from week-to-week how media is performing based on a real-world KPI like visitation, then as a marketer I can very quickly start to make trade-off decisions, and understand what’s working and what’s not working, and can make investment decisions that are smarter for my brand.”

Thompson said that measuring visits against addressable TV exposure also can help brands understand different ways that specific target audiences can be engaged.

“If people we know are exposed to certain media, then we can start to understand who they really are, where do they shop or dine or recreate, and where they choose to travel,” he said. “That level of insight becomes really key to brands. What they’re oftentimes finding is that the consumers that they thought they were going after, where they maybe thought they had a really niche audience — that their assumptions aren’t true. And so there might be other ways to engage this audience that might have been completely different from what brands have thought in the past.”

In analyzing the campaigns, PlaceIQ linked its location insight and visitation measurement capabilities with LiveRamp’s data onboarding and connectivity services, matching their audience segments.

PlaceIQ has been working on applications for it place visitation rate (PVR) metric for several years, and recently raised $25 million in additional funding to ramp up U.S. operations and beef up its analysis and measurement capabilities. The company also recently moved to large a new headquarters in midtown Manhattan, overlooking Bryant Park.

“A lot of marketers want to say ‘If my media is not driving a purchase, then it failed.'” said Thompson. “But what they’re quickly discovering is that, to the extent that media can help drive people to go to that store or that restaurant or take the trip, if we can show that correlation it’s extremely powerful.”

David Hirschman is a co-founder of Street Fight.