At GroundTruth, we’re on marketers’ side. We make it easier to attribute performance results to marketing efforts. That’s in part because we want our customers to reach their goals, but also because foot traffic and in-store visits have value beyond just purchases. 

Here are some of the most surprising ways companies use foot traffic to improve their products, services, and real business results.

1. Foot Traffic Makes Audience Targeting More Precise

Foot traffic data provides companies with information about who their customers are, what their buying habits are and how they like to move throughout the store. But that’s just when they are inside the store. Understanding who showed up to your location based on the ads they were shown can offer a deeper well of information on your target customer. 

For example, if one audience segment shows up to your stores more often than others, you can start to test what makes that audience segment work. Is it messaging? The channel they see your ad on? Or, if an audience segment visits your store less frequently, but spends more money, what learnings can you apply to increase the average check of other segments? 

2. In-Store Visits Improves the Customer Journey 

The touchpoints required for a comprehensive customer journey will always change. As you bring new people into your stores, you will learn which channels will turn them from a first-time visitor to a lifetime customer. 

Companies that combine in-store engagements with digital advertising, and other touchpoints, can build a more effective customer journey much more quickly than those who keep the data siloed. 

In-store visits to learn more about what customers enjoy about their experience. Use that to inform your retargeting messaging as well as any specials you might offer. Those small, but critical, personalizations give you an edge against competitors and mean a lot to your customer base. 

3. Optimize Products and Services with Foot Traffic

Another surprising way foot traffic can support digital ad campaigns is by clarifying what products or services your team should highlight in your ads. Companies that offer a variety of products tend to focus on their most popular ones. Of course that helps for your most general audience, but after a person has visited your store, you can show ads with products more specific to their needs and interests. 

Variety in creative and messaging helps reduce ad fatigue in audiences, plus it helps your marketing reach audiences more efficiently. Both are results you need to create a marketing machine that gets real business results for your company. 

4. Gain More Insights on Competitors with In-Store Visits

Finally, ad campaigns built to drive foot traffic can teach you about your competitors, particularly if you use hyper-local targeting. GroundTruth customers use features like Blueprints to target people right at the moment of decision making. When those ads successfully earn an in-store visit, our customers have a new understanding of what messaging or creative is more compelling compared to their competitors’ offerings. 

Of course, you can ask your customers these questions using surveys, but the real-world behavior that is captured in the moment is vital for optimizing your strategy, reducing excess spend, and driving the real business results you want. 

Increase Foot Traffic and Other Real Business Results with GroundTruth

To learn more about how GroundTruth can help your business drive more in-store traffic, watch our recent webinar with Adweek, Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic? You’ll hear from experts across the industry about how to build successful campaigns that drive real business results. 

The post Surprising Reasons Marketers Need Real-World Behavior for Digital Ad Campaigns appeared first on GroundTruth.

For example, when a brand awareness campaign works, marketers often use it as an opportunity to add nuance to their messaging and positioning so that they can connect more quickly with their target audience personas. 

Successful campaigns that drive foot traffic can help transform your overall marketing strategy, as long as you know what to look for. Here are three ways to leverage foot traffic to improve your overall marketing strategy. 

Add Precision to Audience Targeting

Driving foot traffic also helps marketers create fuller, more nuanced profiles for their individual target customers. Often, companies can default to simple descriptors when they choose which audiences to target, especially for awareness campaigns. Campaigns with specific performance goals, however, require more precise targeting to be efficient and effective. 

At GroundTruth, we report on actual store visits, which let marketers know where customers showed up after seeing certain ads. That tells marketers where their customers are paying attention (digital out-of-home or connected TV, for example), plus what messages, offers, or other details drive customers to take action. 

With that information, teams can increase performance, improve ROI, and avoid excess spending on campaigns that won’t drive real business results. 

Expand Messaging and Creative

Another benefit of driving foot traffic is the direct engagement companies can have with their customers. While online behavior is helpful, real-world behavior provides immediate feedback for what messages resonate with audiences, why they value your product or service, and how they talk about you to their own family and friends. 

Don’t be afraid to ask questions of people while they’re in your store. During checkout, ask what made their experience valuable. Consider asking why they’ve stopped in as they walk through the door. Capture the responses so that marketing can optimize future campaigns. 

As an added bonus, encouraging customers to capture their own moments with photos and videos can help marketing expand the creative on different campaigns. 

Improve Customer Loyalty Programs

Finally, in-store visits can help companies improve their customer loyalty programs and entire customer experience. Whether you are selling a product or a service, repeat customers are the most valuable to your company. The more facetime you have with customers, the more you can cater your loyalty programs to what they want. 

Use your conversations in-store, follow up surveys via email, or retargeting campaigns to understand what drives customers to return to your location, especially over your competition. 

Learn How to Drive In-Store Visits with Digital Campaigns

For more information on how to use your digital marketing efforts to drive real business results, like in-store visits and more, check out our newest webinar in partnership with Adweek, Are Your Digital Ads Driving Foot Traffic? features a panel of experts giving their best strategies for improving your campaigns.

The post Leverage Foot Traffic to Improve Your Overall Marketing Strategy appeared first on GroundTruth.

Years ago, when digital-only advertising platforms arrived, they seemed to make everything easier. From reporting to ad placements, digital advertising made our lives easier, so we stopped prioritizing anything but digital ad metrics. As demands on performance and budget increased, our commitment to faster and easier digital ads only strengthened, whether or not they resulted in the sort “results” our CEOs were expecting. 

In 2024, we just can’t justify prioritizing digital advertising metrics. Marketers need to shift to more thoughtful, comprehensive plans built with a single goal in mind: real business results. Here’s how you make that possible. 

1. Concentrate Efforts on Brick and Mortar Customers

The internet has taken over all of our lives in a way that makes it seem silly to differentiate between online and offline lives. We stay connected to cross-country friends online, we make big announcements online, we shop for homes online. 

But the truth is, 83% of all retail purchases still happen in brick and mortar locations. We are still largely offline buyers, which means, if your Marketing team does not have an explicit plan for driving in-store visits, you’re leaving money on the table. 

To grow consistently in today’s competitive landscape, advertisers must shift their strategies away from digital-metrics-first and create more balanced media plans. That means instead of low CPMs, your North Star metric should be in-store visits. Rethink how you build audience segments so that you are targeting people with proven intent rather than just affinity. Partner with companies that can help you draw clear lines of attribution between each ad set and traffic. 

Unless you make this fundamental shift, your company is at risk for overspending on marketing that will keep you stagnant at best, despite great-looking CPMs. 

2. Expand Your Performance Goals for Connected TV and Other Channels

Beyond that, advertisers need to expand the way they think about audience segments and behaviors across channels. Because digital platforms made it easy to find audiences based on what they engage with online, marketers got out of the habit of thinking about people complexly. 

We see an audience segment named Sports Enthusiasts and we automatically start to narrow what our creative might look like, what the copy is, what actions they will take. It’s not all wrong, of course. A Timberwolves fan likely won’t turn away from an upcoming playoff to visit a new restaurant in town. But, just because you don’t get a conversion at that moment doesn’t mean you didn’t drive one at all. They do need to eat at some point.

When you’re building media strategies, ensure that you can tie impactful channels, like CTV, to real business results, like in-store visits. Don’t settle for views or click-thru rates. Push your media partners to show you how each channel contributed to the goals your board cares about. 

3. Test and Optimize with Real Business Results in Mind

Finally, marketers must shift the way they test and optimize their campaigns. A couple of months ago, I mentioned that marketers often forget that Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) is an efficiency metric. Many believe that if they just hit a benchmark (3:1, for example), that means they’re performing well. But, that isn’t always the case. Higher ROAS is sometimes required to break into new markets or audiences. In other words, for growth.

Digital advertising has conditioned marketers to think about performance in black and white terms. We sometimes optimize for the wrong goals, or, goals that aren’t aligned with what CEOs are asking from us. Goals that feel good in a digital metrics dashboard but don’t correlate to real impact in our business. 

Again, keep your company’s unique goals in mind when you’re testing campaigns and optimizing for results. If you want more repeat customers, optimizing for unique visitors to your website isn’t an effective strategy. Similarly, if your goal is to increase sales, you should be optimizing for in-store visits rather than website visits. Of course, a strong marketing strategy makes room for all these actions, but the main focus, your single goal, should be at the forefront when you make choices about testing and optimizing. 

There is no silver bullet to the top, but in today’s market, marketers who refuse to incorporate these shifts into their strategies risk not growing at all.

The post The Real Reason Your Ad Campaigns Aren’t Working (And 3 Ways to Fix Them) appeared first on GroundTruth.

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Real-World Solutions

The Martin County Office of Tourism worked with GroundTruth to drive visits and boost local tourism, highlighting Martin County as an unspoiled, natural paradise with a plethora of activities such as fishing, outdoor adventures, ecotourism, and more.

Employing a comprehensive omnichannel strategy, this campaign effectively engaged prospective travelers across mobile, desktop, and connected TV (CTV) devices.

Let’s take a deeper look at how the Martin County Office of Tourism used GroundTruth’s media platform and innovative strategies to pinpoint pertinent audiences across the South and Northeast regions, ultimately resulting in a notable surge of visitation, clicks, and heightened interest in Martin County’s tourism offerings.

Tactical Strategies

The Martin County Office of Tourism used GroundTruth’s first-party behavioral audiences, location audiences, and location targeting strategies across mobile, desktop, and CTV to reach prospective travelers and pique interest in Martin County.

Behavioral Audience Targeting

Combined visitation behaviors with demographic information to build sophisticated audience profiles and targeted people based on their lifestyles and interests. Targeted select groups from GroundTruth’s expansive list of first party audiences, like Outdoor Enthusiasts, Beach Lovers, Budget Hotel Visitors, Car Owners, and more.

Location Audience Targeting

Accurately reached potential travelers who displayed visitation patterns to location categories such as Beaches, Campgrounds, and Fishing and Hunting Lodges.

Location Targeting

Connected with travelers and residents across the south and northeast regions of the U.S.

Weather Triggering

Provided contextually relevant, tailored, and timely messaging to potential travelers based on the local weather.

Tactical Strategies -
Omnichannel Spotlight

This omnichannel campaign included ads running on mobile, desktop and CTV which allowed Martin County Office of Tourism to retarget consumers across multiple touchpoints along the consumer journey.

Video Completion Rate (VCR) was extremely high, with a 94% VCR on CTV, highlighting the effectiveness of CTV ads in contributing to brand-building efforts, especially in the travel & tourism vertical.

Hours of screen time for CTV ads was at an impressive 1,648 showing significant user reach.

Real Business Results

GroundTruth drove a total of 1,005 actualized visits to Martin County, with a noteworthy click-through rate of 0.42%. Moreover, the campaign proved to be extremely cost conscious for the travel & tourism vertical, with an effective $27.94 cost per actual visit to the destination. GroundTruth’s strategies had a wide-reaching impact as well, with over 4.4 million impressions.

Targeting related location categories such as Golf Courses, Resorts, and Live Theatres proved particularly successful. Meanwhile, Parents and Outdoor Enthusiasts were more engaged and outperformed other audience groups in both click-through rate and visitation rate, demonstrating the effectiveness of leveraging audiences with a higher likelihood of enjoying Martin County’s natural attractions and outdoor offerings.

By the Numbers

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Working with Cynthia and Glenn at GroundTruth has been an exceptional experience. GroundTruth's commitment to precision and innovative behavioral and location-based targeting tactics is unparalleled. Our campaign saw great results and I'm very pleased to continue partnering with them!

Nerissa Director of Tourism and Marketing

The post Welcome to Paradise: GroundTruth Partnership Drove 1K+ Visits and Increased Local Tourism in Martin County appeared first on GroundTruth.

Last week, we partnered with Adweek to have that exact discussion. Hosted by GroundTruth CMO, Brandon Rhoten, the webinar included four esteemed professionals to discuss how they built their media plans to drive foot traffic and make an impact on their bottom line. The panelists included Brad Haley, CMO at Dave’s Hot Chicken, Gregg Spiegel, SVP Strategic Planning & Analytics at Source, George Ellis, Owner & Creative Director at Bandolier Media, and Francisca Moliere, Integrated Media Supervisor at DNA Creates.

If you missed Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic, we pulled together the top three learnings you can use right now to increase in-store visits and conversions. 

1. Think About the Entire Funnel 

Because our panelists represented experience in huge brands like Dave’s Hot Chicken, Ulta, and TikTok, just to name a few, one of the greatest takeaways they offered was how to push people through the funnel with media. 

Often, brands who are well known do not execute their performance media layer well. Their connected TV (CTV) ads, for example, helps to differentiate themselves from competitors, but lacks the right messaging to bring people in-store. As Rhoten said, companies need to “close the loop to know who you’re advertising to and then measure if it’s working.” 

How do you do this? Moliere suggested leaning into audience segmentation to develop the audience personas. Ask yourself who are the people that are engaging with your brand and what do they value about your products. Use that information to build performance marketing creative and messaging to convert awareness to foot traffic. 

2. Get Creative About What You Say and When

The panelists then discussed how to execute and improve performance once you’ve launched your campaign. Rhoten started the conversation by saying that companies can often take for granted that people forget. They need reminders about your products, your offers, and services. 

Ellis added that partnering with creative agencies can help create a variety of reminders when your team lacks the bandwidth. He said, “Give your marketing team and your agency team something to work with, something new to say, they can find new ways to connect.” 

Moliere also mentioned that it’s important to avoid ad fatigue when the goal is to get people in-store. She suggested companies find the sweet spot between reminding your loyal audiences and ad fatigue. She said, “There has to be a sense of urgency in your marketing if your goal is foot traffic and it keeps the messaging fresh.” 

3. Make Sure You’re Measuring and Testing for the Right Metrics

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the panelists discussed the importance of marketers being the bridge between their team’s efforts and the real business results that their company is looking to achieve. 

Spiegel said, “Make sure to bridge media KPIs with business KPIs.” He mentioned that using GroundTruth helps his team show a line from viewed media to in-store visit. Before, his team would have to rely on disconnected marketing metrics and traffic numbers. Now, they can show exactly how many observed visits happened because of the media they saw. 

Haley concurred, mentioning that as new locations open for Dave’s Hot Chicken, the team relies heavily on the metrics GroundTruth provides to measure both their awareness campaigns as well as their campaigns for foot traffic. Those numbers helped, in part, for DHC to become one of the fastest growing restaurant chains in America. 

Watch the Entire Webinar On-Demand

If you want more strategies and insights from our expert panel, you can watch the entire webinar on-demand. Just click here! Or if you’d like to get started with GroundTruth, schedule a demo with our team. We’d love to help you drive real business results, like in-store visits. 

The post 3 Things We Learned from Our Newest Webinar with Adweek appeared first on GroundTruth.

The post Are Your Digital Ad Dollars Driving Foot Traffic with Adweek appeared first on GroundTruth.

I’ve built my career on strong customer relationships. Part of this is because I love people. I want to know about our customers’ successes, their strategies, and the personal milestones they accomplish along the way. But, more importantly, keeping an open line of communication means our team can focus on the insights and product features that matter most to our customers. 

While having those conversations, one truth became clear to me: real world behavior is the foundation for the real business results advertisers need, like in-store visits and increased ROAS. While the tools and channels continue to evolve in the digital landscape, real world behavior still remains the most important driver for success. 

Let’s talk about why. 

Demands on Marketers Continue to Increase while Precision Decreases for Digital Audience Segments

The appeal of digital advertising was in how easy it is to reach the right audiences at scale, and the ease with which performance can be measured. Up until now, it’s been faster to report how many people visited your website from a mobile ad than those who visited after seeing a billboard on their way to work, a television ad, or any other traditional advertising. 

And because clear attribution matters to everyone from CFOs to board members to marketers themselves, focus has been on digital metrics—especially when advertising is more expensive than ever. But in that time, audience segmentation based on digital behavior is getting less and less precise. As a result, it costs advertisers more to get the same results they used to get. Not ideal. 

I can hear the stress in conversations I have with colleagues and customers old and new. Marketers want to know where to invest their budget to reach their goals. They don’t have time to waste guessing on audience segments or mediums without measurement. They need proven targeting and real, verifiable business results. 

And my answer is always the same: don’t focus on what’s easiest to measure. Follow where the biggest return is: inside your locations, where the majority of transactions still happen.

Real World Behavior Proves Instrumental for Long Term Success

Digital behavior may be easier to measure, but it is not the most valuable behavior to understand. In-store visits are still the most important in terms of purchases and lifetime customer value. And still, companies largely leave it out of the media plans. 

At GroundTruth, we make it impossible to overlook. Our only goal is to make our customers successful in tangible, meaningful ways—in other words, success reflected in your bottom line. Our platform builds audiences based on their habits and real world behaviors, and reaches them at the exact moment they are ready to make a decision. We don’t rely solely on predictions and estimated digital browsing history. We focus on what’s real. Because that’s what our customers are measured on. 

So far, focusing on real world behavior is the only way we know to not only withstand the changes in our industry, but grow through them. It’s why I’m such a big advocate for connected TV, and why we continue to evolve our platform to fit the new ways people live and shop. Because trends and predictions are valuable. But nothing matters more than what people do out in the real world.

The post The Real Business Results You Need Are Driven by the Real-World Behaviors You’re Ignoring appeared first on GroundTruth.

To simplify, marketers start to focus on digital performance metrics, such as click-through rates, because they are easier to understand and pull attribution from. Over time, media plans start to move away from the offline performance metrics that matter most to executives, like in-store visits and increased foot traffic. 

Those real business results are what GroundTruth obsesses over. We drive digital performance metrics too, but the reason customers continue to trust us with their campaigns is because we know how to deliver those results that impact the bottom line. 

Based on our customers’ recent success, we’ve put together a few media mixes that are proven to drive foot traffic that you can use right now. Let’s get into it!

Video Mobile Marketing and Retargeting Ads Build Trust with Research-Heavy Customers

For companies selling large ticket items, the obstacle they face for driving foot traffic is the research phase of the customer journey. Buying a car, for example, is likely the most expensive purchases a person will make. They want to make sure they know what’s available to them and which car fits their needs best before they ever step foot on a lot. 

Mobile video ads tend to work incredibly well for customers in the research phase. Not only do video ads capture attention quickly, they also demonstrate the value of the product in a way that is impossible with words alone. When combined with retargeting ads, companies ensure that their products stay top of mind throughout the research phase. Soon, their product becomes the standard against which the customer compares any new car. 
GroundTruth customer Alpha Media was able to leverage this media mix to drive 17 visits to one of their locations in just over two months, resulting a $24.68 cost per visit. To learn more about their strategy, read their full case study.

Hyper-Local Ad Targeting Helps Converts Ambivalent Customers

Another common obstacle companies face while trying to drive in-store visits is capturing customers before they choose the competition. For example, many customers will wait until the last minute to choose which restaurant they want to go to for lunch. If you’re a restaurant owner, how do you capture attention at the right moment so they choose your location? 

For GroundTruth customer Dave’s Hot Chicken, the strategy was a mix of hyper-local targeting along with an incredible brand marketing campaign. First, the team invested in national awareness campaigns that highlighted their incredible product and loyal customer base. Then, they set their sites on customers who weren’t yet loyal—people who were likely to go to the competition. 
By targeting those individuals when they entered the retail block for each location, Dave’s Hot Chicken was able to drive almost 1,400 visits during a month-long campaign. Because in-store visits also result in more purchases, the team was able to earn a 7.8% increase in sales.

Connected TV and Location-Based Campaigns Build Awareness while Driving Foot Traffic

Finally, if your company sells products that can be enjoyed by entire households, like a beverage, sometimes the most effective media is to get outside of mobile ads and onto bigger channels. A digital out-of-home ad or a connected TV (CTV) ad can go a long way to convince customers to visit stores that carry their products because they capture an entire household’s attention at once.

While mobile ads have a personal experience, CTV ads can get a whole household talking about what they should buy on their next visit to the store, for example. And when combined with on-premise targeting, not only can companies drive visits, but they can also convert customers while they’re in the store. 

That’s exactly what Yachak Organic Tea did to drive over 241,000 visits to retail stores during their campaign with GroundTruth. 

Drive More In-Store Visits with GroundTruth

If you need to get real business results, like in-store visits, you need GroundTruth. Contact us today and we can get you set up to launch the right media plan for your team.

The post Media Mixes Proven To Drive Foot Traffic appeared first on GroundTruth.

Real-World Solutions

Noticing a trend of consumers upgrading RVs and older trucks, Sharp Auto and Alpha Media leveraged GroundTruth’s media platform to drive visits and clicks with strategic, dynamic video ads.

Research shows that 40% of car shoppers discover new vehicles they previously weren’t considering due to video marketing, with the average automotive shopper spending 33% of their research time on mobile devices. These statistics, combined with a notable surge in visits and clicks throughout the campaign time period, underscore the effectiveness of GroundTruth and Alpha Media’s strategies in the automotive industry.

Real Business Results

This campaign was extremely successful. In just over two months, 17 visits were driven with GroundTruth media. Dynamic mobile video ads had an outstanding click-through rate of 1.28%. This campaign was cost effective for Sharp Auto as well, with an average cost per visit of $24.68. When considering the average size of purchase once visits are driven to auto dealership lots, maintaining a low cost per visit is extremely important for auto dealerships.

Overall, this marketing approach demonstrated that auto dealers do not need huge creative capabilities. Rather, relying on dynamic video marketing on mobile devices, combined with GroundTruth’s geofencing and retargeting approaches, created the perfect formula for driving visits to Sharp Auto and subsequently increasing sales.

By the Numbers

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I have been working with Athena and the Alpha Media group for almost 2 years. They have really stayed on top of my…marketing. Their reporting is honest and very inclusive. Athena is open to and always coming up with great ideas and willing to make changes and tweak campaigns on the go!!! The team is responsive and prompt and brings something new each month when we have the previous month recap. I would recommend the Alpha Media team to anyone outside my area, and would not want them to compete with me with them involved.

CHAD Sharp Auto

Rachel and Anthony are great partners. They are always responsive and willing to brainstorm with us on how we can better leverage GroundTruth. We have worked together for several years and they have continued to not only entertain our many questions but also to support our ideas and requests for advancements in targeting such as adding county level targeting and reporting performance split out by geofence. When approximately 80% of our digital accounts include GroundTruth in the strategy, it is obvious that our success in using the platform is a direct result of the support we receive from them both.

ATHENA Alpha Media

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