In an age of widespread digital advertising, using data analytics is essential for ensuring ads reach the right people, testing them effectively, and monitoring the results. This allows advertisers to accurately determine which of their ads generated clicks, leads, consumer interest, in-store visits, and sales. This is great for e-commerce shops with a heavy online presence, but what about brick-and-mortar stores or other businesses using out-of-home advertising like billboards? How can those businesses improve their advertising attribution models outside of digital advertising?

Not only is advertising attribution important when advertising digitally, but it is also important with experiential and physical advertising. If you’re investing in ad spend, then you should be able to track it. This ensures you’re maximizing your campaigns to better understand your audience and reduce wasted resources by focusing on ads that work. So, how can advertisers effectively build attribution models for out-of-home ads? This is where location intelligence comes in. Location intelligence can help you maximize your marketing and advertising in a variety of ways, but let’s look at two scenarios where location intelligence can help you increase ad reach with improved ad attribution.

Let’s say you run a small formalwear boutique in a large city. Lately, your sales have been declining due to post-pandemic economic disruptions like record-high inflation. This has led to some tighter budgets among your customers. As a result, you’ve completely revamped your product offerings to include more casual and affordable styles, and you’re finally ready to launch the new line. Because your boutique is quite exclusive and small, your online presence is limited to social media, with no e-commerce website to sell products. In launching your new product line, you’re planning two billboard ads to promote the new offerings.

You decide to place one ad at a heavily frequented coffee shop near your boutique and another ad next to a bustling downtown bank on a busy road. Over time, you notice an increase in consumer foot traffic and revenue at your boutique, so you decide to buy more ad space. The trouble is that you don’t know which of your ads generated the most traffic and sales. You’d like to place the next ad in a similar location to attract similar consumers, but without the right analytics, there’s no way to tell which of the two ads was key to driving business growth.

By using location intelligence to analyze the real-world behaviors and travel patterns of your customers, you learn that most of your customers came from the coffee shop ad and not the ad you placed near the downtown bank. Location intelligence also helps you understand the affinities and habits of your converting audience. To your surprise, the audience that responded best to your ads were millennials who frequented coffee shops and gyms in your area. With this in mind, you place your next ad in a coffee shop that happens to be next to a trendy spin studio aimed at a millennial audience. The insights from location intelligence provided valuable guidance for your out-of-home ads, resulting in improved return on ad spend and ensuring optimal performance of your ads.

Now, let’s say you’re the owner of a luxury car dealership. Being in the auto industry during a time of shifting consumer trends and post-pandemic economic uncertainty can be tough. In response, you’ve been transforming your dealership to fit the needs of a changing market and stay ahead of the curve. Due to the recent wave of increased consumer interest in connected cars, you decide to launch an ad campaign for your new eco-friendly connected car line. This product line is brand new, so it will be a challenge to determine the right audience to target. Since you’re still learning about what audiences will show interest in this new type of car, you decide to dive all in with social media ads, several billboards, and ads in auto supply stores, as well as several commercials. That’s a lot of ad spend, but you’re hoping one of the ads will hit the right audience to justify the price.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and the sales of the new connected car line have skyrocketed. They’re in such high demand that they’ve sold out, and now there’s a waitlist extending for several months. The ad campaign must have really hit the mark. Because of the success of the ad campaign, you want to determine which ads played the biggest role in driving these impressive sales numbers. It was an expensive campaign across various platforms, so next time you want to consolidate costs by focusing on the best possible audience and channel. So how can you go about measuring advertising attribution for so many platforms and new audiences? Although this seems like an impossible task, you have location intelligence on your side.

After examining your ad performance, you learn that the success of your ad campaign isn’t solely determined by the location and channel of the ads. Besides just where and how ads are seen, you also need to understand what type of audience responds best to your ads. Traditionally, you have always attracted an older, more financially established audience, but now the people who are on the waitlist for your new cars are young business professionals who also frequent the big-box stores in your area. When you combined ad attribution with location intelligence insights, you were able to trace your most successful ads to the billboard that happened to be next to a nearby Target store and another billboard that was next to an office building. With this information, you’re now able to maximize the success of your future out-of-home ads by targeting the right audience.

Location intelligence offers your business valuable real-world insights into consumer behavior, allowing for a deeper understanding of your audience. This insight can help you fine-tune your advertising strategies, boost ad performance, and ultimately achieve a better return on your investment. By leveraging the power of location intelligence for advertising attribution, you not only enhance your ability to tailor campaigns effectively but also gain a competitive edge by maximizing your ad reach and getting more value from your marketing efforts.

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