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.

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.

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.

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.

What ROAS should ultimately reveal is the balance between profitable ad spend and consistent audience growth. If you don’t know how to find that balance, your company won’t be able to scale, particularly in a competitive marketplace. So, how do you get there? Let’s talk about it. 

Maintain ROAS that Makes Your Business Profitable

ROAS should not be used as an isolated performance metric. It does measure efficiency, but the goal is not to be the most efficient. The goal is to drive the maximum amount of sales/traffic/conversions efficiently. ROAS shouldn’t come at the expense of growing those real business results. 

In truth, most businesses are profitable at a ROAS of 3:1. And the tendency is to think that if a 3:1 ROAS is profitable, then a 5:1 ROAS must be even better. That’s true in a standard performance metric. But, with ROAS, it may mean you’re holding back media spend that could drive more net sales.  

Let’s look at the numbers.

Say the real business result you need is to increase sales. If you earn $5 in sales and turn a profit for every $1 media spent on an audience of 100 people, your sales benefit is $400 (revenue minus the ad spend). When you reach beyond that first 100 people, you see ROAS go down. Many are tempted to keep their audience capped at 100 so they maintain 5:1 ROAS. 

But if that same campaign, scaled to 10,000 people, achieves the lower ROAS, $3 earned for every $1 spent, the company is still profitable, and your sales benefit is $20,000. ROAS isn’t higher, but you have made a measurable improvement to sales because you’ve driven sales from more people. Efficiency isn’t getting in the way of real business results. 

And that doesn’t even take into account the benefit of future sales of that bigger audience you’ve now captured. 

ROAS will tend to be higher at lower reach in any effective campaign. The goal is to get to the best return against the real business result you want—in-store visits, sales, check growth, whatever. Efficient ad spend is not the ultimate goal. 

Spend More on Advertising that Drives a Real Business Result

Now is a good time to be clear that not all audiences are created equal. Advertisers can’t expect to maintain profitable ROAS by adding thousands of shoppers to their audience segments arbitrarily. Instead, each campaign should teach you something about where to spend your marketing dollars and on which audiences. 

The best thing to do is find a media partner that can identify audiences likely to become customers. At GroundTruth, for example, we use in-store visits, purchases, and other data based on real-world behaviors to build our audiences. 

Our customers know that when they scale campaigns to include more shoppers, they won’t just see an improvement in vanity metrics, like impressions. They are investing in the kind of audiences that will help them scale the real business result they’re seeking. And on top of this, GroundTruth measures if people you target with advertising are actually showing up to your store through those same real-world behaviors. 

Evolve ROAS Targets as You Scale

Of course, not every campaign will scale exactly as planned. When you find yourself in a situation where ROAS starts to dip below your profitability margin, that is when you need to optimize in a more traditional sense.

Rather than throwing money into bigger audiences, invest your money into advertising you know works for you. Move budget away from awareness campaigns that are meant to grow your audience and into smaller, targeted campaigns that you know will convert to more foot traffic and a lift in sales. The changes don’t have to be forever, just long enough that your ROAS is balanced again. Once you’re back to a profitable ROAS, refocus your investments on audience growth, scaling conversion, and increasing real business results. 

Key Takeaways

• Improving the real business results you’re seeking, like sales growth, can be held back by just focusing on the best ROAS. Sometimes you’ll need to give up some efficiency to grow your audience and scale real business results, then optimize once you begin achieving the result. 
• Better audience targeting can help you deliver advertising with a higher likelihood to drive customers in. Invest in the right platforms to reach audiences based on proven behaviors that lead to conversions, not just interests or broadest reach. 
• The right ROAS target will change throughout the year. Make sure your ad strategy accounts for the ebbs and flows of scaling your campaigns, and always keep the real business result you are seeking as your primary measure of success. 

The post ROAS Is A Great Efficiency Metric, But Advertisers Are Asked to Deliver on Real Business Results 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.

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