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.

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.

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.

While cookies allowed advertisers to access specific audience segments, they were still confined to digital behaviors. Very few media platforms (except GroundTruth) combined online and real-world behaviors to create audiences most likely to take action towards advertisers’ goals. Now that cookies are disappearing, the value of offline behavior in audience segments is immeasurable. Need proof? Let us explain. 

In-Store Visits Prove Intent and Patterns 

Consider the way you browse online during any given day. Some behaviors, like restocking household items, show immediate intent and affinity. But most of our browsing is driven by curiosity. We want to know about the car we saw for the first time, or see the kinds of couches even if they don’t fall in our budget, or daydream about luxury hotels in Greece. 

Compare that to the various retail stores or restaurants you’ve visited. Likely, you don’t show up unless you have intent to buy. For advertisers, building audience segments around real-world behavior provides much greater value without the need for cookies. Performance metrics that matter most to executives, like ROAS and conversions, are much higher with precise audience targeting based on these behaviors and habits. 

Of course, the choice isn’t one or the other. Advertisers should use all tools available to them to run effective campaigns. However, when determining which platforms and tools to use for your new, cookieless plan, those that provide the most precise and relevant audience segments are the ones to invest your money in. 

In-Store Visits Support New and Existing Customer Journeys 

The other important reason to invest in media platforms that build audiences around real-world behavior is to support all stages of the customer journey. Especially in expensive markets, campaigns catered to existing and past customers help increase ROAS and other critical performance metrics. 

Knowing what campaigns bring new people to your locations, what compels people to come back, and what doesn’t, helps build more effective campaigns across all channels. That means not only will digital advertising improve, but offline channels, like out-of-home or direct mail ads will perform better. That omnichannel approach is the only way to get companies to grow in today’s market.

Get In-Store Visits and Other Real Business Results from GroundTruth

If you want to see what is possible for your ad campaigns with cookiesless audience targeting, contact us today. We can walk you through all the powerful features available to GroundTruth customers.

The post A World Without Cookies Means In-Store Visits Are Critical for Growth appeared first on GroundTruth.

To meet the demands of their jobs, advertisers need to rethink Return On Ad Spend (ROAS). It’s more than a performance metric that applies to every company in each campaign. Instead, it’s an efficiency metric that can be combined with other metrics to supercharge results. 

Want to know more? We thought so. That’s why we partnered with Adweek to create a brand new guide: Everything You Need to Know About ROAS Right Now. It’s available now, just click here to download! 

Why ROAS Matters

When we first kicked off the project, we had free range to pick any topic. So, why did we focus on ROAS? The short answer is because we know real business results matter most to GroundTruth customers and advertisers around the globe. 

We also knew the conversation surrounding ROAS lacked nuance that could prevent companies from scaling their campaigns and improving their performance. At the beginning of the year, GroundTruth CMO, Brandon Rhoten, warned that companies need to start thinking differently about how they understand and apply ROAS. The conversation around that article resonated so well with audiences across industries that we thought it was time to create a longer, practical guide to help companies succeed in 2024. 

The partnership with Adweek only made the final guide better. We are excited it’s now available for you to download. 

What You’ll Get from the Guide

Inside the guide, you’ll find an in-depth discussion of the state of advertising today and what that means for marketing professionals. We show how to combine ROAS with other key metrics to improve the overall performance of your media, and give you a step-by-step process for crafting a strategy that works in today’s market. 

“The factors that can make or break a campaign in today’s market aren’t clean cut. Advertisers need to consider a myriad of factors. If you’re not already doing that, this guide will help ramp you up to the level you need to be competitive. For anyone else, this guide provides new ideas that can help bring new life to your media strategies,” Rhoten said. 

Are you ready to upgrade your ad campaigns and drive real business results for your company? Download Everything You Need to Know About ROAS Right Now from Adweek and GroundTruth! 

Download the Guide Now

The post Adweek and GroundTruth Release Guide to Increase ROAS appeared first on GroundTruth.

Every once in a while, though, they won’t make the impact we’re hoping for.

If you find yourself in a similar situation, it’s important to know the campaign is not a bust. There are four, often overlooked, that can not only correct a slow-performing campaign, but also generate the real business results you’re looking for, like boosting ROAS.

Let’s dive in.  

1. Use Precise Audience Segments

The audience you target can make or break a campaign. Even the most compelling messages won’t work on the wrong people. Marketers know this and work diligently to reach the right people. But not all segments are created equal. 

The media platform you use, and more importantly, the data that platform uses to build audience segments can make the difference between high ROAS and an underperforming campaign. For example, GroundTruth uses cookieless first-party data to build audiences based on verified behaviors. We go beyond online browsing and ensure that our audiences are built on real-world behavior. 

If you want to ensure that your campaigns are reaching people with habits that matter (like physical visits and purchases), ask your media partners about the data they use to build audience segments. The answers they give may highlight why you can’t break your ROAS barrier. 

2. Create an Aligned Customer Journey

Another factor that often goes overlooked is where users are in the customer journey when they see ads. All companies need to attract new customers, so all marketing teams focus on how much it costs to convert a new customer. But that’s not the whole story. Marketing teams also want new purchases from current customers. 

Obviously, that means creating campaigns that are more than just retargeting ads or awareness campaigns. This audience needs specific marketing that speaks to their experience with your business, whether you’re a B2B or B2C company. 

To optimize ROAS and other real business results, consider how you’re connecting with past, current, and potential customers. Are your messages specific enough to speak to where they are in the customer journey? Do you highlight the value of your products and services in the best way for what they need? If you’re struggling to achieve the ROAS you want, the answers to these questions will usually reveal opportunities to improve. 

3. Improve Attribution Models

The next factor to consider is how you’re building reports and attributing the real business results to marketing efforts. One of the most common struggles marketers face is getting credit for the strategies they create. 

GroundTruth built the foundation of our technology with identity graphs, which means our customers can easily identify the real business results created from their advertising campaigns. For example, they know when one of their ads drove someone to a store.

Armed with this information, they don’t have to rely on broad calculations of ROAS. They can make the connection between campaigns and revenue earned. As a result, they can build more informed campaign strategies, replicate successful audience segments, and repeat their success over and over. 

If you’re having trouble understanding what boosts ROAS and what’s hurting it, make sure to look into your attribution and reporting structures. 

4. Test the Ad Types for Your Goals

Finally, if you’re still unable to increase ROAS, dig into the ad types you’ve chosen. Are they right for the goals of your campaign? It seems like such a simple question, but in our experience, that means it often goes unasked. 

We’ve seen it happen to companies in all industries. They use the same creative across all channels. Their direct mail piece looks like their mobile ad, which also looks like the ad that runs on Connected TV (CTV). While all these ads should have similar messages, they shouldn’t be duplicates of each other. 

When creating a comprehensive campaign across multiple channels, remember the way people engage with those channels. Someone driving down the highway will have a lot less time to understand your product than someone leisurely scrolling through their phone. Your ad types and CTAs should reflect that. 

Take a look at your entire campaign to ensure that you’re not asking too much (or too little) from your audience based on the goals of your campaign. There will likely be an opportunity to switch a few ad types and boost ROAS. 

Boost ROAS with GroundTruth

If you want to learn more about how GroundTruth can help you improve ROAS and drive other real business results, like in-store visits or incremental sales, contact us today. We can get you set up with the best plan for your next campaign. 

The post Four Factors to Consider to Boost ROAS appeared first on GroundTruth.

Rosie O’Meara, GroundTruth’s CRO, sat down with Evan Moore, SVP, Commerce Partnerships at NBCUniversal and William Bradley, Adweek Editor, to discuss all things Connected TV (CTV), including why companies should invest right now. (Hint: undeniable ROAS). 

If you weren’t able to make the event, we pulled some of the best moments to recap it all here for you. 

The Current State of CTV Advertising 

The group started the discussion with the state of CTV right now. Moore touched on the fact that we’re experiencing “a re-discovery of television for the modern age.” He said, “Advertisers can earn ROAS from CTV that they’ve been getting from digital channels” up until this point. 

O’Meara agreed, adding that some estimates put ad spending on CTV at $30 billion in 2024. This year is also the first year that cord-cutting households surpassed linear households. That means, not only are the younger generations using CTV more, but older generations are also adopting CTV, providing advertisers with an incredible opportunity to reach audiences across a wide range of demographics and interests.   

Benefits of Advertising on CTV Right Now

All the numbers indicate that CTV is a smart investment for marketers, but in today’s world, with marketing budgets under tremendous scrutiny, companies want more than a good idea. They want a sure thing. And O’Meara and Moore both agreed that CTV is as close as you can get at this point. 

O’Meara said, “CTV is a performance channel that can work at any stage of the funnel. It’s a device where people are co-viewing. They stream while looking at their phone or tablet. If your ad mix includes both CTV and mobile, for example, it’s a 1+1=3 situation.” 

Moore echoed that sentiment, pointing out, “TV is exclusively for entertainment. We might use our phone or desktop for entertainment, too, but it’s also a tool for work and communicating. We give TV a different level of attention and engagement than we do other screens.”

Later in the discussion, Bradley brought up the fact that this year is an election year, which means ad spend will increase for everyone, not just political advertisers. O’Meara suggested that is another reason CTV is an important investment for performance marketers this year. “Remember in linear TV when you’d get bumped? Your ad can’t get bumped because of political coverage on CTV!” 

Sounds like a no-brainer to us! 

The Future of CTV

Of course, in a room full of marketers, the discussion inevitably turns to what’s possible. The panel, with some prompting from Bradley, started brainstorming what the future of CTV could look like. 

As with most conversations, this one turned to AI quickly. O’Meara said that while companies were “data, data, data for so long” AI is helping “turn attention back to creative” by helping to optimize the ads. But more importantly, recommendation engines where advertisers can use data from others in their industry to inform their media mix, timing, and spend level across campaigns. 

In the distant future, O’Meara said she was excited for the day people get used to making big purchases through their TVs. She reminded the crowd how we used to be weary of making big ticket purchase on our phone, and now it’s second nature. That same adoption can happen with CTV, which is excellent news for advertisers. 

Overall, it was an exciting discussion full of insights and inspiring ideas for the future.

Launch a CTV Campaign with GroundTruth

If you want to learn how GroundTruth can help you launch a CTV campaign that layers in a performance component (think driving foot traffic to your stores, incremental sales, or simply, higher ROAS), contact us today. We’ll show you how easy it is to turn real-world behavior into marketing that drives real business results.

The post Adweek Hosts GroundTruth for Connected TV Discussion appeared first on GroundTruth.

The post Improving ROAS in A Flooded Market: How to Reach Customers Ready to Convert appeared first on GroundTruth.

We know that isn’t true. Marketing and advertising are fundamental elements of a successful company. But finding solutions to better ad campaigns can be difficult, especially in a highly competitive market. To help marketers improve their strategies, boost ROAS, and prove the value of their efforts, we’ve highlighted 3 key changes to make to get more from your marketing campaigns. 

1. Target Audiences Based on Behaviors

Often, when marketers think about optimizing their advertising campaigns, they start with changes to creative or messaging. Sometimes they evaluate whether the audience is right for that particular ad set. But rarely do they look into the data that informs the different audience segments their campaigns are targeting. More specifically, they don’t know exactly how the advertising platform determines who should be included and who shouldn’t. 

At GroundTruth, we use behavioral data to determine audience segments. We don’t just look at browsing trends or online interests. We include past visits, purchasing data, and any other real-world behaviors we can use to create the most accurate  audiences. The result is more valuable actions from your target audience—think increased visits to your stores, check growth, and higher ROAS. 

If you aren’t sure what kinds of data informs the audience segments on your current advertising platform, ask! It can give you a better idea about changes to make to your strategy to improve your performance. 

2. Focus Goals On Each Advertising Channel

When making choices about what ads to place and where, sometimes marketers can default to more is better. And it makes sense. The more people who see your ad, the more people you can retarget, and eventually convert. But, it doesn’t always work that way, especially if the ad you’re serving doesn’t make sense for that channel. 

Think about a Connected TV (CTV) ad. Placing ads on CTV is proven to bring in real business results for companies. But only if they use it correctly. For example, some companies will include a CTA for users to visit a website to learn more. Sure, they’ll put the website on the ad, but most users don’t watch their favorite shows ready to type out a URL. They do usually have a second device with them, like their phone, that can scan a QR code. 

Or maybe your team created a QR code for your campaign and put it on a DOOH ad. But the billboard is on a busy freeway, in a state that makes it illegal to use your phone while you drive. That doesn’t mean the messaging or the audience is incorrect. It just means the team hasn’t thought about using the right creative on each channel. It may require higher investment upfront or longer production time, but it will result in a much higher return when your ad works in each of the different channels. 

Before you launch your next campaign, ensure that the ad sets you create make sense for how users behave on that channel and what they expect from the content they see.  

3. Use ROAS As A North Star Metric

Finally, the best way to ensure that you’re making the right strategic decisions is to pick a metric that communicates performance, efficiency, and impact on the bottom line. In other words, using ROAS as your north star performance metric ensures that you are focused on the top priorities for the marketing team, and your company as a whole. 

You can decide, based on what your focus is, whether you measure ROAS by marketing channel or campaign. That may change throughout the year. But as long as everyone agrees that ROAS will be the most important metric, all your choices will remain aligned and move your team in the right direction. 

Achieving this kind of alignment is also much easier when your team can get a holistic view into reporting with data that is timely, relevant, and accurate. Make sure that you can see how all your campaigns are working together in a single view so that you are making informed decisions as quickly as possible. 

Make the Switch to GroundTruth to Get Real Business Results

GroundTruth is the only platform that turns real-world behavior into real business results, like in-store traffic, incremental sales, or higher ROAS, for marketers. If you want a partner that can help your advertising dollars work more efficiently, contact us today. We’ll show you the difference GroundTruth can make in your next ad campaign.

The post 3 Changes to Make to Ad Campaigns to Achieve Real Business Results appeared first on GroundTruth.

That much attention on a single metric can help keep everyone on the same page about advertising campaign performance, and it can also invite a lot of opinions about whether teams are pushing themselves to get the best ROAS results possible. 

Because we love finding ways to make our customers more efficient, we put together this quick guide to ensure that you’re pulling the most out of your ROAS reports and optimizing your advertising for the real business results you need. Let’s start with the most important question: 

What Does Reporting on ROAS Really Tell You? 

Most advertisers can explain what ROAS means, but what ROAS communicates in terms of performance can vary based on the company and its goals. While the metric is similar to Return on Investment (ROI), in that it measures what your company earns based on what it spends on advertising, calculating ROAS can be more nuanced. For example, advertisers can calculate ROAS for something as specific as an ad set, or as broad as an entire quarter. 

To understand what ROAS reveals about your advertising performance, marketers must first define the goals they’re trying to achieve. For example, if a beverage company wanted to know what customers value most about their newest drink, they might calculate and compare ROAS for two ad sets that each contain separate messages. This would show which messages inspire the most purchases from their target customers. But this wouldn’t tell the marketing team much about whether their target audience is correct or not. That would require a different calculation of ROAS. 

As you talk to your agency partners, or dive into the reporting yourself, consider how you’ve set up ROAS to be calculated and what it’s really telling you about the efficiency of your campaign. By personalizing your reports to fit the goals of your marketing team, you ensure the data you used to build your strategies is the most accurate, relevant and timely. 

Low ROAS Could Mean A Number of Problems In Your Ad Strategy

Once you have the correct data to report on ROAS, you may start to see certain campaigns or advertising channels performing lower than expected. That happens to the best advertisers! There’s no need to panic. That only proves there is room for optimization. 

The most common reasons for low ROAS in your reports include: 

• The media is incompatible with the channel: Are you placing static images on a video-heavy platform? Is your DOOH ad too wordy? Not every ad will work across channels. Check that you’re ad makes sense for where your audience sees it. 
• Audience targeting is imprecise: Targeting audiences based on browsing behavior can create excess spending. Building audiences based on real-world behaviors, such as in-store visits and previous purchases makes each of your ads more likely to convert. 
• Ad spend isn’t high enough: Advertising is expensive. Sometimes the only way to get a high return is to increase the initial spend (as long as you can trust your dollars are being spent wisely in the first place). 
• Customers are fatigued: If you’ve shown your ads to the same group of people for a long period of time, it may be time to give them a break and focus on a different audience segment. Ad fatigue can contribute to lower conversions and decreased ROAS, which is why it’s important to continue to test and experiment. 

High ROAS in Reports Can Also Mean You Need to Optimize

When you hit your goals, you can assume what you’re doing is working. What you won’t know is if your strategy is working the best it can. An example we see frequently is customers who hit their target ROAS for residents within a 20 mile radius of their location. We love to see success like that. But we always ask ourselves (and them) if they could double their ROAS if they extended their audience segments another 10 miles. With the same accuracy in audience targeting, that extra audience pool to serve ads to may help them reach their stretch revenue goals. 

It won’t work in every scenario, but advertisers should keep in mind that optimizing high performing ads can often have just as big of an impact as optimizing low performing ads. When combined together, the constant testing can help boost ROAS in all campaigns across channels. 

GroundTruth Can Help You Improve Your Most Important Metrics

If you want to see how GroundTruth helps customers execute their advertising campaigns, boost ROAS, and get the real business results they need, contact us today. We’ll show you how our platform reduces excess spend and targets audiences most likely to convert on your most important goals.

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But, we wanted to give our customers something more—a more complete picture of their results. For a number of reasons, some technical and some as simple as customers visiting a store without their phone (yes, it does happen), our Observed Visits metric has historically underreported how many visits a campaign drives. That’s why we’re introducing Projected Visits. 

How Projected Visits Helps Customers

Advertisers can’t make the best optimization decisions without the best data. Projected Visits is another way to get reliable data on our customers’ campaign performance. We use statistical sampling from our visitation data to provide a high-confidence estimate of real-world visits. Projected Visits captures a holistic view of the impact our customers’ ads have on their real business results. 

One of the ways we ensure our customers can use Projected Visits confidently is by implementing campaign requirements in order to measure the Projected Visits. We knew it was important to establish a standard model that could be trusted. We implemented thresholds for impressions and Observed Visits and as long as a campaign hits those thresholds, we have what we need to build a sample and provide a projection. 

How do we create the sample? For each campaign, we create a panel of impressed devices with frequent location signals. That panel’s visitation behavior is applied to all the impressed devices to calculate media performance. To be selected for a panel, a user must accurately reflect the characteristics of the larger population and provide frequent location signals. 

To put it simply: Projected Visits = (Visitation Rate of Panel Users)* Impressed Users.

How to Think About Projected and Observed Visits

If you’re wondering how to use Projected Visits, especially when you’re also tracking Observed Visits, we totally understand. The main goal of adding Projected Visits is to give you more confidence in your reporting, but we also want to have confidence in the actions you take based on your reporting. So, here’s the best way to use both metrics. 

Observed Visits is a direct measurement of people who have visited your store after seeing an ad. These are directly attributed to your ad placements and strategies. But, as we mentioned, they aren’t the whole picture. Under-reporting can happen. And Projected Visits fills in those gaps. 

Projected Visits should be used together with Observed Visits to highlight ways to expand your reach and optimize the effectiveness of your ad placements. More information leads to more accurate insights and more real business results. 

See Projected Visits In Action

If you want to learn more about Projected Visits and how it can help you make more informed decisions about your ad spending and performance, contact us today. We’ll be more than happy to walk you through all the details.

The post GroundTruth Introduces Projected Visits for Customers appeared first on GroundTruth.