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As a media planner or buyer, it’s essential to understand how your campaign is performing across all media channels. Yet it can be hard to know how best to measure your cross-channel advertising efforts. Footfall attribution is key to helping you do so, as it not only provides audience optimization and brand uplift, but it can also help you determine your optimal media mix strategy.

Footfall Attribution: The Ultimate KPI for Cross-Channel Measurement

According to eMarketer, a striking 97% of advertising decision-makers are either already running or planning to run integrated, multimedia campaigns within the year. Given this overwhelming reliance on cross-channel campaigns, advertisers need a universal metric for campaign measurement.

eMarketer graph of cross-channel campaigns


With advertisers running campaigns on channels such as OOH and TV, it’s no longer enough to rely exclusively on digital metrics such as viewability, CTR, and engagement. You need a metric that ties together advertising efforts across all channels, and footfall attribution is perfect for this since it shows the direct impact of cross-channel ad exposure on driving store visits. Footfall attribution serves as the ultimate KPI for cross-channel measurement since it provides insight into the offline impact of campaigns through both campaign optimization and brand uplift.

Audience Optimization to Improve Performance in Real Time

A great benefit of footfall attribution is that it enables you to optimize your campaigns in real time, based on store visits. By measuring which ad impressions influenced the best audience segments for in-store visits, you can adjust your campaigns accordingly by shifting your audience targeting to reach segments that have a higher chance of conversion throughout the campaign.

For example, if you see that coffee enthusiasts are converting at a higher rate, you can adjust your ad impressions to focus on more audience segments that reflect higher conversion rates. By continuing to focus your impressions on higher performing segments throughout the campaign, you can get more value for your brand by driving more visits from a qualified audience. This means that you can adjust your media spend to be more efficient with your audience targeting, which will lead to more visits and decrease your media costs.

Brand Uplift to Prove Campaign ROI

Though brand uplift, advertisers can gain post-campaign insights to understand the impact that their campaigns had on driving consumers to store. If their campaigns resulted in “uplift,” — i.e. more consumer visits to store — then that is a key indicator of success of the campaign. Using real-world actions such as store visits can help you prove campaign ROI, especially if you can link a given visit to an actual sale. If you’re optimizing ad impressions and spend against targeted audiences, brand uplift can also provide the ROI of your in-campaign optimization tactics.

Cross-Channel ROI

Finally, it’s important to understand how each channel in your media mix is affecting the other, so that you can optimize your entire media mix. Cross-channel measurement can help you drive ROI, by allocating proportional credit to each marketing touchpoint across all channels and revealing which combinations of media do best. This way you can see how each channel affects the other and overall performance leading up to a store visit.

For example, you could see that your TV and mobile efforts combined drove 40% more visits than TV alone, and 60% more than mobile alone. Through insights like this, you can determine how best to allocate your budget across all your channels in order to optimize your media mix against the right audiences for your brand.

Now that you’ve learned how footfall attribution can enhance your media mix, be sure to check out our blog about how Cuebiq’s attribution dashboard specifically can help you do this.

About the Author

Isabel Sperry, Manager, Growth Marketing
