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Measuring Foot Traffic from Your Connected TV Campaign

Measuring Foot Traffic from Your Connected TV Campaign

Written by enCOMPASS Agency

Connected TV campaigns—increasingly popular among advertisers in recent years—can offer a range of benefits. However, some of these benefits can be easier to identify than others. For instance, no one really doubts that connected TV advertising can improve brand awareness. When it comes to increased foot traffic to a retail store, however—well, there you’ll find greater skepticism.

This isn’t because such foot traffic can’t be measured, however; it’s just because not a lot of advertisers know precisely which analytics to use. In this post, we’ll briefly present a few practical ways to measure foot traffic from your connected TV campaign.

Start with Quality Inventory

To find success in any kind of digital advertising—and that certainly includes connected TV—it’s vital to start with quality inventory. The digital ad industry is growing by leaps and bounds, and there’s more money spilling into this field all the time. That’s mostly a good thing, but it can also have downsides—namely, it makes digital advertising more attractive to fraudsters. It’s always imperative to protect your brand and also your budget, and the way you do that is by always making sure you get clean and highly viewable inventory.

Here it must be noted that some connected TV inventory is better than others, and it can sometimes be a challenge to separate the quality inventory from the fraudulent stuff. As a general rule, however, the more premium the content is, the higher the completion rates and the less likely it is you’ll encounter fraud. To that effect, the safest options we can recommend are either premium private marketplace (PMP) or full-episode player (FEP) ads. The former will hook you up with top-tier publishers—think HGTV or ESPN. FEP ads, meanwhile, connect you with the folks who are watching full 30-to-60-minute TV episodes on a network website or app.

Again, these are the safest bets for finding clean inventory, and they have the added bonus of putting your ad content in front of a truly captive audience.

Locate Customers Across Device Types

Something else to remember is that, in today’s landscape, people don’t necessarily watch TV on their actual TV. Instead, they consume content on a range of devices. What’s more, many individuals watch TV while simultaneously doing other things—e.g., watching a favorite show from their Apple TV while scrolling through Facebook on their phone. The challenge marketers face is connecting all these dots to map out the consumer journey.

What makes things even harder is that certain technology platforms will interpret a single user as several different people as they switch between tasks and devices. What advertisers can do to make sense of things is to get a cross-device identity graph, available from third-party data aggregate companies. These reports will help you identify when a consumer sees your ad on TV and then immediately looks up the product on Pinterest, to name just one possible scenario.

This is a significant undertaking, compiling this vast assortment of device IDs and user cookies, but it can pay off huge dividends as you try to trace your customers along their journey.

Use a Foot Traffic Attribution Study

The final step here is to commission a foot traffic attribution report—again, something that will likely require the resources of a third-party firm. Such studies will present you with data from opt-in users, allowing you to draw a straight line to the real-world impact your connected TV campaign has on smartphone consumers. You can even track when your target consumers are in close proximity to your retail location. This is done through GPS captures of device IDs among the consumers filtering into your store.

There are endless possibilities here to learn not just how much foot traffic you’re getting, but which demographics seem best represented by this foot traffic—allowing you to further customize and optimize your connected TV campaign.

This, too, is a big undertaking, and it requires a large data set—but by working with the right partner, you can achieve real insight into how your connected TV ads are affecting your in-store foot traffic. For most brands, that kind of information is invaluable.

Take the Next Step with Connected TV

As we noted at the top, connected TV can be advantageous in more ways than one—but actually being able to generate and measure foot traffic is one of the most significant benefits of all. To learn more about how this is done, or to launch your own connected TV strategy, give us a call. The enCOMPASS team is always ready to discuss exciting new options in digital advertising. Reach out today and let’s chat.

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