5 Self-Serve Online-to-Offline Attribution Platforms

This post is the latest in our “Targeting Location” series. It’s our editorial focus for the month of March, including topics like location-based ad targeting, attribution, and privacy. See the rest of the series here. 

This is the first in a two-part series on attribution platforms. Look out for the second piece this week, and shoot us an email at [email protected] if you think your attribution company should be included in future articles.

How do online campaigns influence in-store visits and sales? It’s an increasingly relevant question, given that 43% of millennials now say they research purchases online and buy in-store, and it’s one that brand marketers are finally able to answer through the use of online-to-offline attribution platforms. But what about smaller firms that don’t have the budgets for full-service campaign managers?

Marketers with limited budgets are turning to a bevy of self-serve online-to-offline attribution solutions to correlate visitation rates and purchase data with digital campaigns. Utilizing a variety of testing methods for mapping campaign performance and purchases, these platforms are giving marketers the answers they need to justify online ad spend.

Here are five examples of online-to-offline attribution platforms that marketers are using right now.

1. GroundTruth
GroundTruth’s self-serve location advertising platform can help marketers understand their campaigns, increase store visits, and make more strategic forecasting decisions. Brands can buy and manage all of GroundTruth’s advertising products through a self-serve platform, reaching consumers based on where they’ve been and based on precise weather conditions. Brands can then leverage the data that their campaigns generate to produce foot traffic insights and consumer behavior trends. GroundTruth has worked with brands like Athleta, Toyota, and the American Red Cross.

2. Semcasting
Assumptions aren’t enough to prove whether digital campaigns are actually creating an increase in store visits, which is why Semcasting developed its own deterministic attribution platform for marketers. Semcasting describes its platform, The Attributor, as the first self-serve, omni-channel attribution platform to deterministically measure performance across the modern marketing mix. The platform compares audience addresses to those that were served impressions or visited a brand’s website in the past and then identifies matches. Semcasting works with businesses in a number of industries, including retail, automotive, and healthcare.

3. Commerce Signals
In just 72 hours, Commerce Signals says brands can start understanding which of their marketing strategies are working—and which are not. Using the first-party data set of customer payment transactions, brands are able to measure incremental in-store, online, and in-app sales driven by digital advertising. Over the years, Commerce Signals has partnered with a number of companies, including 4INFO and LiveRamp, to bolster its attribution offerings. Using a self-serve tool, advertisers can dig deep into their campaigns and track online and offline sales, incremental sales metrics, and in-store versus online views.

4. Cinarra
Cinarra analyzes the effectiveness of online messaging for brands and publishers by measuring consumers’ real-world venue visits. Cinarra is able to generate walk-in rates, audience reports, frequency, and lead-time analysis, along with foot traffic analytics. In November, the company launched an attribution platform dubbed VitalSight as a way to provide clients with real-time analytics that measure the correlation between website visits and in-store visits. VitalSight’s self-service reporting interface uses mobile carrier data.

5. OptiMine
OptiMine provides cross-channel marketing analytics across both digital and traditional channels. The company helps brand marketers maximize the impact of their campaigns by optimizing ad mix and spend across channels and devices. OptiMine’s Insights platform builds thousands of models to measure the contributions of marketing channels and ads. The platform can measure any outcome, including those from online, in-store, and multi-channel partners. Importantly, the platform can also be run in a self-service fashion. OptiMine clients include Coolibar, MediaVest, and Aflac.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.