Fast Food Brand Increases Visits for Multiple Locations With Simpli.fi’s Advanced Location Targeting
Overview
ADVERTISER OVERVIEW
Large fast food burger chain in the Northeast and Midwest U.S. sought to run marketing campaigns at the corporate-level for more than 350 locations, with the goal of increasing visits by location and promoting a new vegetarian menu item.
AGENCY OVERVIEW
Independent agency specializing in media services and integrated account management for multi-location brands selected Simpli.fi to leverage granular location-based targeting tactics and precise attribution for multiple locations.
Fast Food Chain Seeks to Increase Visits and Promote New Menu Item
From January to April 2021, fast food restaurants experienced a 33% increase in the number of visits nationwide (SmallBizTrends). As fast food consumption grows, this presents an opportunity for advertisers to drive in-person visits to their locations and attribute store traffic to their campaigns. Recently, a large burger chain in the Northeast and Midwest wanted to take advantage of these programmatic advertising capabilities and worked with their advertising agency to drive visits to their stores and promote a new Impossible Burger offering.
The team used Simpli.fi’s Addressable Audience Curation tool to build a custom household-level audience in real-time based on location data and by choosing from more than 700 demographic variables. The team curated a list of more than 10.1 million households with consumers who were ages 18-24 and 25-44, and also were likely to visit QSR locations.
Their agency had recently partnered with Simpli.fi to leverage accurate location-based targeting tactics and granular attribution for national multi-location brands. They strongly recommended the advertiser use Simpli.fi’s precise solutions for Addressable Programmatic and traditional Geo-Fencing to accomplish their goals. The agency also sought to use Simpli.fi solutions alongside existing third-party segments to compare performance and optimize to the highest performing tactics. The advertiser wanted to implement two separate campaigns with distinct goals:
- First, to drive visits and measure foot traffic for 353 of their locations.
- Second, to promote a new vegetarian Impossible Burger menu item.
Together, the advertiser, agency, and Simpli.fi created a unique strategy to drive foot traffic to 353 stores in 11 DMAs across nine states by curating and activating a custom addressable audience and deploying Geo-Fencing to conquest competitor locations.
For both campaigns, the team desired to achieve a $5 Cost Per Store Visit to one of their restaurant locations. The brand looked forward to tapping into granular reporting with foot traffic conversion attribution down to the individual store-level and optimize their campaigns accordingly. Additionally, they used Simpli.fi’s Geo-Conversion Lift metrics to measure incremental visits to their restaurants from the targeted locations attributable to the campaign.
Driving Physical Visits Based on Location
First, the agency and advertiser wanted to build a custom addressable audience for targeting at the household-level.
They used Simpli.fi’s Addressable Audience Curation tool to build a custom household-level audience in real-time based on location data and by choosing from more than 700 demographic variables. The team curated a list of more than 10.1 million households with consumers who were ages 18-24 and 25-44, and also were likely to visit QSR locations.
Simpli.fi’s Addressable Geo-Fencing solution used GPS data paired with plat lines to match each address to the exact physical location, shape, and size of the property. The system then automatically built a target fence around each property to serve display, pre-roll, and OTT/CTV ads across devices within each household.
The team also deployed Geo-Fencing to conquest competitors by targeting users who were visiting other nearby QSR locations. The team could then target those users to encourage them to visit one of the brand’s nearby locations. Simpli.fi drew 4,770 target fences around neighboring competitors and other businesses including McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Dunkin’, and Hardee’s.
With Simpli.fi’s variable recency settings, the advertiser could target potential customers with ads for up to 30 days after they visited a target-fenced business. The campaign leveraged Simpli.fi’s cross-device matching capabilities to serve both display and pre-roll video ads to the same user across multiple devices such as smartphones, desktops, and tablets.
Finally, the team drew a Conversion Zone around each of the 353 locations to measure the number of users who visited one of the restaurants in-person after having been delivered an ad. This allowed the agency to report on individual store visits attributable to the Addressable Geo-Fencing or Geo-Fencing campaigns. Simpli.fi set up the campaign so that each tactic, creative, and city was broken out to optimize and report on each store individually.
Data-Driven Optimizations
Furthermore, the agency provided a third-party audience segment of users who had been identified as vegetarians in order to further promote the new Impossible Burger. This enabled the agency and Simpli.fi to compare performance between Simpli.fi’s proprietary targeting tactics and the segment in order to make mid-flight optimizations. After the initial results, it became clear that Simpli.fi’s data was outperforming the third-party segments, and the team shifted additional budget to Simpli.fi’s tactics in order to maximize performance.
Measuring Offline Conversions to Multiple Locations
Overall, the brand and agency were pleased with the results as they drove significant traffic to the restaurants during the duration of the campaign. In total, the brand measured more than 215,000 visits at a CPV of $1.09, greatly exceeding the $5 goal.
Furthermore, using Simpli.fi’s Geo-Conversion Lift reporting, the advertiser measured a 31.76% growth in incremental visits to their restaurants. This increase highlights the percentage difference between customers who visited the desired locations after receiving an ad versus those who naturally visited the location without receiving an ad. As a result of the successful campaign, the advertiser continues to use Simpli.fi’s solutions to drive visits, and the agency is actively recommending Simpli.fi to their other clients.