Group C Digital and Simpli.fi Boost In-Person Visits for Grocery Store Chain
Overview
ADVERTISER OVERVIEW
Grocery store chain with a large presence in the Midwest sought to increase and measure in-person visits. Their corporate team manages advertising for all 126 store locations.
GROUP C DIGITAL OVERVIEW
Working with Simpli.fi via a hybrid self/managed-service model since 2019, they are a full-service agency specializing in digital campaign management, placement, optimization, and measurement.
Multi-Location Conversion Tracking
For corporate marketing teams that manage advertising on behalf of a high number of individual stores, campaign management can be complicated and expensive. These brands require partners that can deliver efficient targeting and comprehensive attribution at scale. Recognizing this, a grocery store chain in the Midwest was looking to successfully target local audiences nationwide across 126 storefronts, increase in-person visits, and accurately measure visits by location. The brand enlisted their agency, Group C Digital, to find a top tier programmatic provider that could improve their overall advertising performance.
Trusted Agency Partnership
In late 2019, Group C Digital was in the process of selecting a programmatic partner for all of their clients. First and foremost, the agency wanted a platform that could efficiently drive and accurately measure in-person visits for multiple locations at a time. After careful consideration, they chose Simpli.fi because of the ability to gauge individual store traffic, the flexibility and support of a hybrid service model, and innovative targeting solutions. The partnership has grown over the years, and the agency now works with Simpli.fi for 20 multi-location brands to strategize and execute high-performing advertising campaigns.
Custom Campaign Strategy
On behalf of the grocery store chain, Simpli.fi and Group C Digital planned a comprehensive year-long campaign utilizing Simpli.fi’s Geo-Fencing with Conversion Zones solution. Each organization worked together to build a strategy that would drive low-cost visits to the brand’s 126 individual stores. The advertiser proposed locations for targeting, Group C Digital provided digital media expertise to set campaign parameters and monitored reporting, while Simpli.fi recommended best practices and optimizations from similar campaigns with other advertisers. As a campaign goal, the team sought to achieve an average Cost Per Visit of $5.00 between mobile and OTT/CTV creative types.
Conquesting Local Competitors
In order to attract active shoppers in close proximity to the brand’s stores, the strategy focused on conquesting nearby competitor locations. The Simpli.fi team drew custom-shaped target fences around 88 competitor stores, which were provided by the advertiser. By capturing this custom audience from competitor locations, the advertiser could target nearby active shoppers for up to 30 days after leaving a competitor’s store. In order to accurately measure visits from competitor stores, Simpli.fi drew Conversion Zones around each of the advertiser’s 126 physical locations. This enabled Group C Digital to report on visits at the individual store level as well as total figures. Furthermore, the advertiser could see which competitor location the user came from, and attribute the cost of each visit.
Cross-Device Targeting and Attribution
After capturing this audience who visited the target fences, the campaign served both display and OTT/CTV ads to potential consumers. Simpli.fi’s cross-device matching links all of a user’s devices in order to deliver large-screen OTT/CTV ads based on mobile location data. When a user entered a target fence with their smartphone and then returned home, Simpli.fi could serve display ads on mobile devices and OTT/CTV ads to the big screen in their living room. Furthermore, Simpli.fi identifies this same user who had seen an OTT/CTV ad and who then visited one of the Conversion Zones around the brand’s stores to track a physical conversion.
Measuring Success of Multi-Location Campaigns
During the course of the flight, Group C Digital used Simpli.fi’s robust reporting and analytics to monitor campaign perfor- mance. They tracked results in real-time, including key factors such as which target fences were driving traffic to individual Conversion Zones, the highest-performing devices types, and more Leveraging a hybrid self-service and managed-service model with Simpli.fi enabled Group C Digital to focus on their areas of expertise in order to better serve the client. While the Simpli.fi team built and managed the day-to-day operations of the campaign, Group C Digital had full transparency and reporting access to perform data analysis and prepare customized perfor- mance reports for the advertiser.
The advertiser was thrilled with the results that Group C Digital and Simpli.fi delivered. The average Cost Per Visit was just $3.22, beating the original goal of $5.00. Additionally, the CPV for mobile ads was only $2.25 and $5.27 for OTT/CTV ads. In total, the campaign brought in more than 163,000 visits to 126 stores between June 2020 and June 2021. Both the advertiser and Group C Digital continue to partner with Simpli.fi to drive in-per- son visits to their stores.