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Foot Traffic 

Marketers are under immense pressure from executives and board members to deliver results. Metrics like impressions or traffic won’t cut it as performance metrics anymore. Instead, marketers focus on measuring real business results, like foot traffic. 

As a performance metric, measuring foot traffic can influence everything from audience targeting strategies to your company’s media mix. If you’re new to measuring foot traffic from your ad campaigns, we’re here to help. Here is everything you need to know. 

What Is Foot Traffic? 

Foot traffic describes the people who walk through your door. Whether you have one location or multiple, if customers can visit a physical store, they are considered foot traffic. In marketing, specifically, foot traffic measures how many people visited your store after they were served one of your ads. 

Despite the rise of online shopping, most retail purchases are made in physical locations. What’s more, people are more likely to make purchases once they are in your store. Marketers build ad campaigns around increasing foot traffic because it will also increase return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) and other important performance metrics.  

Foot traffic also helps marketers understand who their audience is. Because the laws on consumer privacy continue to change, many online marketing metrics can be imprecise. Foot traffic is an accurate measurement of interest, customer loyalty, and purchase intent. No matter what industry your company is in, those are key indicators for growth. 

Importance of Foot Traffic in Marketing Strategy

To execute a true omnichannel marketing strategy, marketers must consider how their tactics drive foot traffic. Online traffic is helpful, but foot traffic helps create a better customer journey, build more precise audience segments, and increase purchases. Without campaigns specifically designed to bring customers into their locations, companies are leaving money on the table. 

How to Boost Foot Traffic 

To boost foot traffic, there are a few things companies must consider. First, consider the audience segments targeted by your campaigns. Awareness campaigns often target as many people as possible, but to increase foot traffic, the audience segments should be much more focused. Consider creating hyper-local audience segments based on their locations throughout the community. This is particularly effective when ads have limited time offers or something similar. 

Another factor to consider when trying to boost foot traffic is how you’re retargeting existing customers. Marketers tend to prioritize new customers at the top of the funnel. However, targeting existing customers often requires fewer marketing dollars and are 10 times more likely to convert than campaigns targeting new customers. 

Finally, companies often see an increase in foot traffic when they leverage multiple advertising channels at the same time. Customers today engage with their favorite brands across multiple screens, including their smart TVs, gaming consoles, phones, and laptops. Companies that use an omnichannel strategy for their campaigns can see as much as 2x the foot traffic. GroundTruth customers, for example, see 61% more customers when combining connected TV (CTV) ads with mobile. If you want to push customers through the marketing funnel quickly, and boost foot traffic, consider what other channels you can leverage to connect with target customers. 

Understanding Foot Traffic Data

Not all foot traffic data should be treated the same way. Factors such as seasonality and time of day can impact how much foot traffic a location sees. Those cycles can happen without the influence of an advertising campaign. In order to make the connection between marketing efforts and increased foot traffic, companies need a media platform, such as GroundTruth, which shows observed visit data for campaigns. 

Using our Blueprint feature, we can show the number of people who visited a store location after seeing an ad. With the ability to show direct foot traffic attribution, marketers can easily show the impact their efforts are making separate from seasonal foot traffic or other factors. 

GroundTruth Uses Location Data to Increase Foot Traffic and Other Real Business Results

To learn more about how GroundTruth uses real world behaviors, like location data, to drive foot traffic and other real business results, check out our Blueprint page. With more than 500 million locations Blueprinted, we can create precise audience segments so that your ad gets in front of people most likely to visit your store or purchase your product. 

You can also check out our latest case studies to see how current customers are leveraging our platform to execute record-breaking campaigns. And, of course, you can always contact us to get your specific questions answered. 

Further Reading on Foot Traffic