How Agencies and Advertisers Can Target Relevant Audiences During Covid-19
Since establishments have limited services to take-out, pick-up or delivery, advertisers are creating geofences where they know consumers are still going. Rather than using the actual footprint of a restaurant, advertisers can use custom polygons to include the pick-up area in the parking lot or the QSR’s drive-through area.
Getting creative to find restaurant audiences is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Even when large portions of the population are staying home, there are ways to find and advertise to audiences that are high-intent in a range of consumer categories. There are several commercial and public locations that you can target to help find audiences that are relevant to your clients and your campaigns. Below I detail optimal strategies for major categories of brick-and-mortar physical businesses.
Three Ways to Solve for Foot Traffic Attribution
What most ad platforms cannot tell you is how your ads drove foot traffic to stores and other physical locations you care about. If driving foot traffic to retail locations is your job, Google Ads and other digital ad dashboards can’t help you. When in-store foot traffic attribution is crucial, how do you solve for it?
In this article, we cover three ways to solve for attribution, ranging in difficulty from easy to hard. We look into easy options that are inexpensive but tend to be unreliable. We evaluate a medium option that has a moderate cost but is highly reliable and bypasses human error. And lastly, we look at a hard option that incorporates several tools and, while highly reliable, comes at a high cost and is difficult to scale.
Discounts Drove Black Friday Foot Traffic
To see how clothing retailers fared, we took a look at foot traffic to the top 10 in the U.S. We did a straight comparison on foot traffic between Black Friday weekend last year and this year (11/28/19 – 12/2/19 and 11/26/20 – 11/30/20).
Across all 10 retailers, store visits dropped an average of 42%. Who fared best? Who took the biggest hit? We queried our proprietary geofencing marketing database. Here’s what we found.