Determining the success of advertising campaigns and marketing initiatives often involves looking at multiple factors, beyond views, clicks, or even sales generated. Foot traffic is a key component that can reveal the impact of a campaign on a brand or individual locations, and provide an understanding of how a campaign shifted visitation away from competitors. The Placer XTRA Campaign Impact report helps assess the impact of campaigns on visitation.
You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:
- Did a campaign change visitation to your locations?
- What is the uplift seen in visits during the campaign period?
- How did the campaign impact your locations relative to the industry or group of competitors?
Get started with the following steps:
Step 1: Define the campaign period and locations to assess
a. The XTRA Campaign Impact report is compiled by Placer’s team and delivered specifically for your account to analyze your custom parameters. To request the report visit the XTRA catalog in Advanced Reports, or the Placer Marketplace and select the Campaign Impact report.
b. In the report’s request form, begin by specifying the group of stores or locations that you want to analyze, referred to as “Measured Group”. These are the locations that you expect to have been impacted by the campaign.
c. Next, specify the dates during which the campaign took place.
d. You can also set the attribution window to measure visits after the campaign period and attribute them to the campaign analyzed. By default the attribution window is set to 14 days.
Step 2: Specify the benchmarks you’d like to compare against
a. Once you have defined the campaign parameters, you can specify the benchmarks you would like to compare the locations measured against, to best assess the impact of the campaign itself and isolate other factors like trends and seasonality seen across the industry. The report automatically compares campaign visits to the same dates in the previous year, and also to a prior period which is automatically set to the same length of the campaign including the attribution window, right before the campaign began. If you would like to examine a different “prior comparison period” please specify that in the notes section of the request form.
b. You may compare visits at the locations you are measuring to a different group of stores or locations, referred to as the “Control Group”, in order to assess whether changes in the visitation during the campaign are seen across other locations, and identify the impact of the campaign itself.
The campaign summary below shows a comparison of the same chain, Walmart, in different states, West Virginia vs. Maryland, to assess whether fluctuations in visitation are a general trend across Walmart stores, or the result of the campaign.
c. You may also benchmark the locations measured to the relevant industry, or compare against a specific chain or a tag, to determine whether fluctuations in visitation are seen across the market, or the result of the campaign.
The example below illustrates an analysis of the same region where the campaign took place, in this case West Virginia, and comparing the measured Walmart locations to all the Superstores in the state. Using the Store Visitation Trendline you can identify how the measured stores performed relative to the industry throughout the campaign dates to hone-in on the impact of the campaign.
Step 3: Determine the impact on visitation
a. At the top of the report you will find a quick summary of changes in visits and visit share at the locations measured relative to the previous period and previous year defined.
In the example below, you can see that the Walmart locations measured in West Virginia had a 3.1% and 2.7% increase in total visits during the campaign period relative to the prior period and previous year respectively. Likewise, the visit share of these Walmart locations in West Virginia relative to visits to all superstores in West Virginia have also increased by 0.7% and 0.4% during the campaign period relative to the prior period and previous year respectively.
b. You can also assess the impact on visitation at the locations measured by examining the calculated visitation lift. Here you can see how the locations measured compared to the industry benchmark and the control group, along with the breakdown of visit performance for each group at each relevant time frame.
c. Lastly, at the bottom of the report you will find a visual representation of the difference in visits and visit share, which you can use in your presentations and other materials to demonstrate the campaign’s impact.
