Location-based targeting has become a powerful tool for marketers who seek to reach a precise audience. However, national brands with numerous physical locations often find it difficult to localize advertising and effectively track the lift in store traffic.

National branding campaigns don’t allow for customization to each market based on local preferences, audience size, and individual store needs. Many programmatic platforms are not able to scale down to locally targeted campaigns while still achieving delivery and performance goals. Further, attributing offline performance metrics to an online campaign is still often an expensive and complex process.

A well-known automotive services brand with thousands of locations across the U.S. faced this exact challenge. They needed an unconventional and effective solution to localize national campaigns and increase in-store foot traffic by reaching car owners in the market for an oil change, tire service, or other automotive maintenance.

The Strategy

The automotive services brand and their local marketing partner knew it was vital to select the right programmatic partner. Ultimately, they chose Simpli.fi based on our advanced location-based mobile advertising technology.

Together, the brand, their marketing partner, and Simpli.fi developed a programmatic strategy to:

The Work

Simpli.fi and the advertiser developed a comprehensive strategy of Search Retargeting, Geo-Fencing with Conversion Zones, and Event Targeting to generate foot traffic. They leveraged Simpli.fi’s Geo-Conversion Lift metrics to measure how their ads impacted store visits.

First, the Simpli.fi team built geo-fences around designated areas near each of the 2,132 store locations across the U.S. to reach people in close proximity to the stores. A complementary Search Retargeting strategy focused on corresponding geographic boundaries in order to more effectively target car owners who indicated interest in tire services, oil changes, and more based on their web activity.

The campaign also featured a unique application of Simpli.fi’s Event Targeting solution, which allows advertisers to capture users from a location at an exact date and time period and serve ads to them later. Simpli.fi built Event Targeting geo-fences around all local competitors that offered oil changes in a 10-mile radius around each of the advertiser’s locations. These captured users were then retargeted three months later at the time their next oil change would be due.

Finally, Simpli.fi built Conversion Zones around each of the advertiser’s 2,132 locations to track the number of individuals who had seen an ad associated with the campaign and then visited the location in person.

The Results

Going beyond standard programmatic measures, the advertiser wished to gauge the effectiveness of this campaign with the action-based metric of “lift in foot traffic.”

Simpli.fi delivered more than 400,000 total geo-fence conversions over the course of the campaign. These conversions resulted in a positive 246% surge in incremental store visits, as measured using Simpli.fi’s Geo-Conversion Lift metric. This increase reflects the percentage difference between users who visited a conversion zone after being delivered an ad and those who naturally visited a conversion zone without being delivered an ad after being seen in a target zone.

Further, Simpli.fi’s Reporting and Analytics Center allowed the advertiser to have insight into the number of conversions at each individual store location and the geo-fences that the users visited.

For more on how Simpli.fi can help your business see results like these, reach out to us at hi@simpli.fi.