How to run a successful Drive to store Campaign

Drive-to-Store campaigns have been an integral part of harmonising the online and offline journeys of the modern-day customers. But as the world slowly opens up reeling from the pandemic, the drive-to-store campaigns have never been more important than now! By deploying an intelligent drive-to-store strategy, you can not only close the online and offline loop but also get more for your media budgets so that your campaigns have an incremental impact.

Proximity or drive-to-store campaigns are those that use the lat/long geolocation provided by the user’s device as targeting criteria and/or to personalize the advertising message. The term “drive-to-store” is reserved for campaigns whose specific purpose is to bring users to a certain location, in which case the ability to measure visits of users impacted by the campaign to that location is involved.

Drive-to-Store Best Practices

In this section, we will walk you through some key practices that you must bear in mind when running a drive-to-store campaign. Since each phase of the campaign requires distinct approaches, we will talk about what you need to be aware of before, during and after launching a drive-to-store campaign.

Before Campaign Launch

• Build the right audiences and conversion geolist

When building a drive-to-store campaign, location plays a key role, and hence it is important to make sure you are using the correct GPS coordinates of your stores. Start by building out a list of all of your points of interests (stores, restaurants, etc). This step is essential to build out drive-to-store campaigns since those are also the areas you will use to measure campaign results. While adding areas to the geolist it is also important to add a radius of the targeting areas selected. You could also select a walking or driving time to define those areas. Do not forget to add a ‘conversion timing’ to your geolists so that you only measure visits when your stores are open. This will help you to count visits to your stores only during opening hours.

Look into the right audience lists depending on the user’s interaction with the campaign. Creating Interaction-based audiences (views, clicks, conversions, etc.) can be useful to identify users and how they interact with your ad. For example, there might be some users who saw the ad but didn’t click on it and you might want to serve them a different type of encouraging message. By leveraging a vast pool of our Audience solutions or third-party data you can target and retarget users in a privacy-safe way. 

• Use engaging creative formats

The right creative formats and size play an equally important role in the success of your campaigns. Use creatives with high impact, such as interstitials, rich media, native or video, and analyze which works best for your campaign goals using our Strategies feature to do A/B testing. With mediasmart, you can use click-to-map to send the user to a location, opening the maps application of the user’s device with directions to the closest point of interest when the user clicks on an ad. This is extremely useful for drive-to-store campaigns and any other campaign with specific groups of area segmentation. Alternatively, you can also use the map directly on your creatives through Rich format, leveraging our Creatives with maps templates, from our partner NEXD, or using any similar solution from your preferred rich format provider.

• Set the right attribution window 

Having the right attribution plays a key role in the scale of your campaign. By setting the right period of time in which a click or an impression led to an install is determined, you can focus on the right channels to deliver results. As a best practice, having an attribution window between 15-30 days allows you to track footfall to your stores. Additionally, measure any metric that matters to you: impressions and clicks, conversions, or viewability.

During Campaign 

• Measure incrementality in real-time 

Solutions such as mediasmart’s real-time incremental metrics per campaign can help you to stop budget waste. By focusing on only those conversions that are incremental, brands can measure effectiveness with 3 KPIs: Uplift Factor, Exposed %, and specially Incremental Visit %. 

Uplift Factor: It represents the likelihood of the visit to your store being driven by your mobile or connected TV campaign. Technically, it compares the conversion rate (% of impressions that result in a visit) of a campaign creative with the conversion rate of placebo/ghost impressions. Placebo users are not served the campaign creatives, but otherwise have exactly the same characteristics as the campaign targeting.

Exposed %: It measures the percentage of visitors observed around the store, restaurant, hotel, etc. that have been previously exposed to the campaign within the attribution window.

Incremental Visits %: It is the most important KPI. It estimates the increase in visits to the store and the ultimate measure of the “impact” of our campaign. This is the KPI that measures the incremental value you are getting from your campaign by taking the % of measured visits that were exposed to the campaign and deducting any visits that would have happened independently of your campaign.

On top of these, for a broader analysis, when you share the average daily visits to your store, the system will provide the absolute number of Incremental Visits and the Cost per Incremental Visit. 

• Audience mapping and frequency capping

Audience mapping allows you to identify a user based on the device’s identifiers that the users have consented to share. By deploying audience mapping, it can help your campaigns to have a frequency capping across environments as well as targeting audiences on web inventory, targeting audiences on iOS inventory when no identifiers are available, and help campaigns perform better by suppressing audiences that have already generated conversions.

• Monitor the campaign performance closely

Having the right insights into campaign performance can help you to optimize quickly in real-time and make adjustments to improve results. By taking advantage of mediasmart’s Campaign Monitor Tool, you can go behind the scenes to look into the bidding funnel for any campaign or strategy. It can be a very useful tool for troubleshooting and also give you insights into configuration changes in the campaign for improved performance. 

After the Campaign

• Dive deep into granular reports 

The success of the campaign may mean different things to different advertisers. Each advertiser has a niche need and KPIs they are measuring for success. Granular reporting tools allow you to dive deeper into the insights and what different values of the KPIs mean for the campaign success. By choosing the relevant set of KPIs to represent your campaign you will be able to have a holistic view of analytics and can optimize accordingly.

Additionally, with elements such as Heatmaps, you can use the data to analyse campaigns at a single glance.

• Take advantage of connecting drive-to-store and Connected TV 

Running drive-to-store campaigns alone may not be enough. Get more from your campaigns by linking ads on Connected TV to actual visits to the stores. This allows you to get greater engagement, deliver more relevant messages to consumers in bigger and more appealing formats, as well as to measure the success of your sales. 

• Be smart and re-use the conversion geolists for future campaigns. 

Continue to build on your conversion geolists for future campaigns to retarget the audiences elsewhere. As you continue to re-use your conversion geolist you will be able to make your campaigns more precise. Remember, the higher the precision, the campaign will only be served to those users who we know for sure will be in the areas selected. The higher the precision, the less available inventory you will have for the campaign. So choose the conversion list carefully by a thorough validation process.